ARTag, AprilTag and CALTag fiducial systems comparison in a presence of partial rotation: Manual and automated approaches

Abstract

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. Fiducial marker systems have unique designs and various geometric shapes but all of them could be automatically detected with cameras. Fiducial marker system are used in such fields as augmented reality applications, medicine, space and robot-assisted tasks. A variety of applications determines criteria, which characterize qualitative properties of a marker and include such evaluation benchmarks as resilience to occlusion, distance to a marker, false positive and false negative rates, sensitivity to illumination, and others. This paper presents experimental comparison of existing ARTag, AprilTag, and CALTag systems with regard to their reliability and detection rate in occlusions of various types and intensities. Two camera types are used for experiments: inexpensive Web camera FaceCam 1000X and a high fidelity camera, which is a main vision sensor of a Russian humanoid robot AR-601M. In addition, we describe preliminary results of virtual experiments in ROS Gazebo environment. Our long term goal is to calibrate humanoid robot manipulators in real-world environment applying a pre-calibrated camera of the robot, while the presented in this paper results help selecting a most suitable marker system for further calibration procedures.