Design, Detection, and Tracking of Customized Fiducial Markers

Abstract

Fiducial markers such as QR codes, ArUco, and AprilTag have become very popular tools for labeling and camera positioning. They are robust and easy to detect, even in devices with low computing power. However, their industrial appearance deters their use in scenarios where an attractive and visually appealing look is required. In these cases, it would be preferable to use customized markers showing, for instance, a company logo. This work proposes a novel method to design, detect, and track customizable fiducial markers. Our work allows creating markers templates imposing few restrictions on its design, e.g., a company logo or a picture can be used. The designer must indicate positions into the template where bits will encode a unique identifier for each marker. Then, our method will automatically create a dictionary of markers, all following the same design, but each with a unique identifier. Finally, we propose a method for detecting and tracking the markers even under occlusion, which is not allowed in traditional fiducial markers. The experiments conducted show that the performance of the customizable markers is similar to the best traditional markers systems without significantly sacrificing speed.