Design and Detection of Local Geometric Features for Deformable Marker Fields

A major limitation of contemporary fiduciary markers is that they are either very small (they try to represent a single point in the space) or they must be planar in order to be reasonably detectable. A deformable large-scale marker or marker field that would be efficiently detectable is the objective of this work. We propose a design of such a marker field -- the Honeycomb Marker Field. It is composed of symmetric hexagons, whose triplets of modules meet at "Y-junctions". We present an efficient detector of these image features -- the Y-junctions. Thanks to the specific appearance of these synthetic image features, the algorithm can be very efficient -- it only visits a small fraction of the image pixels in order to detect the Y-junctions reliably. The experiments show that compared to a general feature point detector (FAST was tested), the specialized Y-junctions detector offers better detection reliability.