On the Design and Evaluation of a Precise, Robust and Scalable Fiducial Marker Framework

In this paper we present an improved color based planar fiducial marker system. Our framework provides precise and robust full 3D pose estimation of markers with superior accuracy when compared with many fiducial systems in the literature, while color information encoding enables using over 65,000 distinct markers. Unlike most color-based fiducial frameworks, which requires prior classification training and color calibration, ours can perform reliably under illumination changes, requiring but a rough white balance adjustment. Our methodology provides good detection performance even under poor illumination conditions which typically compromise other marker identification techniques, thus avoiding the evaluation of otherwise falsely identified markers. Several experiments are presented and carefully analyzed, in order to validate our system and demonstrate the significant improvement in estimation accuracy of both position and orientation over traditional techniques.