Unveiling the Potential of iMarkers: Invisible Fiducial Markers for Advanced Robotics

TL;DR

This paper introduces iMarkers, unobtrusive fiducial markers detectable only by robots and AR devices, enhancing aesthetics while maintaining detection robustness for various robotics applications.

Contribution

The paper presents the design, hardware, and software algorithms for iMarkers, enabling invisible, customizable fiducial markers with high detection accuracy in robotics.

Findings

iMarkers outperform traditional markers in detection robustness

iMarkers are customizable for different visibility and encoding needs

Effective in diverse robotics scenarios

Abstract

Fiducial markers are widely used in robotics for navigation, object recognition, and scene understanding. While offering significant advantages for robots and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, they often disrupt the visual aesthetics of environments, as they are visible to humans, making them unsuitable for many everyday use cases. To address this gap, this paper presents iMarkers, innovative, unobtrusive fiducial markers detectable exclusively by robots and AR devices equipped with adequate sensors and detection algorithms. These markers offer high flexibility in production, allowing customization of their visibility range and encoding algorithms to suit various demands. The paper also introduces the hardware designs and open-sourced software algorithms developed for detecting iMarkers, highlighting their adaptability and robustness in the detection and recognition stages. Numerous evaluations have demonstrated the effectiveness of iMarkers relative to conventional (printed) and blended fiducial markers and have confirmed their applicability across diverse robotics scenarios.