Comparing Fiducial Marker Systems Occlusion Resilience through a Robot Eye

A fiducial marker is a system of unique planar markers, that are placed in an environment and should be automatically detected with a camera through marker-specific detection procedures. Their application varies greatly, while the most popular are industrial systems, augmented reality, and robot navigation. All these applications imply that a marker system must be robust to such factors as view angles, types of occlusions, distance and light condition variations etc. Our paper compares existing ARTag, AprilTag, and CALTag systems utilizing a high fidelity camera, which is a main vision sensor of a full-size Russian humanoid robot AR-601M. Our experimental comparison verified the three marker systems reliability and detection rate in occlusions of various types and intensities and a preferable for AR-601M robot applications marker system was selected