Occlusion-free animation of driving routes for car navigation systems

This paper presents a method for occlusion-free animation of geographical landmarks, and its application to a new type of car navigation system in which driving routes of interest are always visible. This is achieved by animating a nonperspective image where geographical landmarks such as mountain tops and roads are rendered as if they are seen from different viewpoints. The technical contribution of this paper lies in formulating the nonperspective terrain navigation as an inverse problem of continuously deforming a 3D terrain surface from the 2D screen arrangement of its associated geographical landmarks. The present approach provides a perceptually reasonable compromise between the navigation clarity and visual realism where the corresponding nonperspective view is fully augmented by assigning appropriate textures and shading effects to the terrain surface according to its geometry. An eye tracking experiment is conducted to prove that the present approach actually exhibits visually-pleasing navigation frames while users can clearly recognize the shape of the driving route without occlusion, together with the spatial configuration of geographical landmarks in its neighborhood.