Abstract
Public displays are widely used to provide information or simply as a piece of art. Emergent display technologies combat the problems associated with traditional public displays, by allowing pixels to be distributed anywhere, as opposed to in a typical Cartesian grid. Emergent display technologies are becoming increasingly popular both commercially and academically. As they require little infrastructure emergent displays can be exposed to both human and environmental factors which will affect the integrity of the displays content.
This dissertation presents an objective discussion regarding a number of methods which allow for emergent displays to be tracked; with the overall goal of content not being affected while the display is in motion. Lancaster Universities prototype emergent display, Firefly, provides the vehicle for the study of the implementation and evaluation of standard transformation estimation methods combined with new innovative feature extraction techniques. In a live scenario the accuracy of approximation methods was found to perform consistently better than any other proposed method. This dissertation provides a detailed description of potential techniques to track an emergent display, as well as the difficulties in the domain that must be taken into account during future work.