An Efficient and Feasible Color-Based Technique for Object Picking

Abstract

3D object picking, or 3D object selection, is a very important human-computer interaction technique. By touching the object in the 2D screen, users can change some properties of the corresponding object in the 3D virtual world. 3D object picking is widely studied and applied in the following three situations: 1) the target object is significantly occluded; 2) the target object has small size; 3) and the target object is in a dynamically changing location. Since most previous 3D object picking techniques were developed and tested in static or negligent contexts, many 3D applications tended to incorporate small size and dynamic objects as part of their typical interaction, which doesn’t meet the needs of the development of today’s touch screen technology. Thus, this paper proposes a new color-based picking technique in 3D scene to solve this problem. We provide two different solutions for different application scenes: for the target object whose surface has a fixed color, we take the fixed color as the picking tag; as to the object whose surface has customized texture, we regard the invisible color package set by us as the picking tag. The evaluation shows that we have obtained significant increases of the picking accuracy in many different scenes when compared with the improved ray-casting picking technique.