Survey on occlusion handling in augmented reality

Occlusion handling plays a very important role in Augmented Reality system, which is a key issue to be addressed. Although this problem has been extensively studied, there is still no complete and general solution due to the limitations on related key technologies such as foreground segmentation and depth extraction. This paper presents a technical review on recent research progresses regarding occlusion handling in Augmented Reality. The paper contains four parts. Firstly, the processing scenario of mutual occlusion in Augmented Reality is described. Secondly, three types of the state-of-the-art techniques for occlusion handling are discussed, including model based approaches, depth based approaches and image based approaches. In the third part, performance and application scope of each technique are discussed, and two typical improved approaches are concluded. Finally, the research trends are discussed.