andreasjakl.com

In the final part, let’s look at how we can generate and use the AR depth maps through Unity’s AR Foundation. In the previous part, we tested the ready-made example. Now, it’s time to write code ourselves.

In this case, I’m using Unity 2021.1 (Alpha) together with AR Foundation 4.1.1 to make sure we have the latest AR support & features in our app. But as written in the previous article, Unity 2020.2 should be sufficient.

I’ve tested the example on Android (Google Pixel 4 with Android 11 & ARCore), but it should work fine also on iOS with ARKit.

You can download the full, final AR Foundation Depth Map sample from GitHub. I’ve released the project under MIT license.

Project Setup

First, configure the project for AR Foundation. I won’t go into too many details here, as the official documentation is quite good on that:

1. XR Plug-in management: activate the management in the project settings. Additionally, enable the ARCore Plug-in provider. To check if everything was installed, open Window > Package Manager. You should see both AR Foundation as well as ARCore XR Plugin with at least version 4.1.1.

2. Android player settings: switch to the Android build platform, uncheck multithreaded rendering, remove Vulkan from the rendering APIs, make sure the package name is personalized and finally set the minimum API level to at least 24 (Android 7.0).
3. Scene setup: add the required prefabs and GameObjects to your scene. Right-click in the hierarchy panel > XR > XR Session. Also add the XR Session Origin.

By default, the AR depth map is always returned in Landscape Right orientation, no matter what screen orientation your app is currently in. While we could of course adapt the map to the current screen rotation, we want to keep this example focused on the depth map. Therefore, simply lock the screen orientation through Project Settings > Player > Resolution and Presentation > Orientation > Default Orientation: Landscape Right.

In the previous parts, we’ve taken a look behind the scenes and manually implemented a depth map with Python and OpenCV. Now, let’s compare the results to Unity’s AR Foundation.

How exactly do depth maps work in ARCore? While Google’s paper describes their approach in detail, their implementation is not open source.

However, Google has released a sample project along with a further paper called DepthLab . It’s directly accessing the ARCore depth API and builds complete sample use-cases on top of them.

DepthLab is available as an open-source Unity app. They use the ARCore SDK for Unity directly and not yet the AR Foundation package.

Depth Maps with AR Foundation in Unity

However, Google recommends using AR Foundation with their own ARCore Extensions module (if needed; currently, they only add Cloud Anchor support). Therefore, let’s take a closer look at how to create depth maps using ARFoundation.

In part 2, we rectified our two camera images. The last major step is stereo matching. The algorithm that Google is using for ARCore is an optimized hybrid of two previous publications: PatchMatch Stereo and HashMatch .

An implementation in OpenCV is based on Semi-Global Matching (SGM) as published by Hirschmüller . In Google’s paper , they compare themselves to an implementation of Hirschmüller and outperform those; but for the first experiments, OpenCV’s default is good enough and provides plenty of room for experimentation.

3. Stereo Matching for the Disparity Map (Depth Map)

OpenCV documentation includes two examples that include the stereo matching / disparity map generation: stereo image matching and depth map.

Most of the following code in this article is just an explanation of the configuration options based on the documentation. Setting fitting values for the scenes you expect is crucial to the success of this algorithm. Some insights are listed in the Choosing Good Stereo Parameters article. These are the most important settings to consider:

• Block size: if set to 1, the algorithm matches on the pixel level. Especially for higher resolution images, bigger block sizes often lead to a cleaner result.
• Minimum / maximum disparity: this should match the expected movements of objects within the images. In freely moving camera settings, a negative disparity could occur as well – when the camera doesn’t only move but also rotate, some parts of the image might move from left to right between keyframes, while other parts move from right to left.
• Speckle: the algorithm already includes some smoothing by avoiding small speckles of different depths than their surroundings.

Visualizing Results of Stereo Matching

I’ve chosen values that work well for the sample images I have captured. After configuring these values, computing the disparity map is a simple function call supplying both rectified images.