Sharp-edged, de-noised, and distinct (SDD) marker creation for ARToolKit

Abstract

Fiducial markers are widely used in many Augmented Reality (AR) applications such as to manipulate AR objects, robot navigation, education and AR based games. ARToolKit is an open source, easy to configure and well-documented tracking system which is widely used for designing marker based AR applications. The quality of ARToolKit markers plays a vital role in the performance of these AR applications, but currently there is neither algorithm nor quantitativemeasure to guide users for designing high quality markers in order to achieve their reliable tracking. In this paper we studied the effect of edge sharpness, noise and markers distinction on markers reliability. We also developed the specialized algorithms for designing Sharp-edged, De-noised and Distinct (SDD) markers, which have low inter-marker confusion and are highly reliable.