ALVAR Desktop
Introduction
ALVAR is a software library for creating virtual and augmented reality (AR) applications. ALVAR has been developed by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. ALVAR is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1, or (at your option) any later version.
ALVAR is designed to be as flexible as possible. It offers high-level tools and methods for creating augmented reality applications with just a few lines of code. The library also includes interfaces for all of the low-level tools and methods, which makes it possible for the user to develop their own solutions using alternative approaches or completely new algorithms.
ALVAR is currently provided on Windows and Linux operating systems and only depends on one third party library (OpenCV). ALVAR is independent of any graphical libraries and can be easily integrated into existing applications. The sample applications use GLUT and the demo applications use OpenSceneGraph.
For more information, please see our ALVAR Brochure.
Features
- Marker based tracking
- accurate marker pose estimation
- two types of square matrix markers
- future marker types are easy to add
- recovering from occlusions
- Using multiple markers for pose detection
- the marker setup coordinates can be set manually
- or they can be automatically deduced by autocalibration
- Markerless tracking
- feature-based (tracking features from the environment)
- template-based (matching against predefined images or objects)
- Other
- hiding markers from view
- tools for calibrating cameras
- several methods for tracking optical flow
- distoring/undistorting points, projecting points
- finding exterior orientation using point-sets
- Kalman library and several other filters
Download
To download the ALVAR library, please fill out the registration form.
For more information on ALVAR, we provide an ALVAR Presentation that gives a general overview of the library and the ALVAR User Manual that goes into much more detail.
Contact
For additional information or any other questions, please contact us using the alvar.info@vtt.fi mailing list.