Design of Imperceptible Metamer Markers and Application Systems

This paper presents a application system using imperceptible metamer markers. The proposed system is based on metamer markers that are invisible to the human eye but visible to infrared (IR) cameras. The metamer means the indistinguishable colors with different spectrums. RGB cameras cannot capture the different spectrums of metamer markers, but IR cameras can detect the metamer markers printed under the color image. This paper describes how to create metamer markers using a ordinary color printer. First, uniformly select color samples from the RGB color space, analyze the visibility of RGB colors and metamer color printed by the printer, and then design a color mapping model between color printers to produce the effective metamer color. After confirming successful detection of a metamer marker under various infrared lightings and filters, the exact color differences were analyzed and the validity of the proposed method was clarified. To verify its applicability, a prototype of fairytale book was published and demonstrated as an AR-book. The metamer markers are expected to be very useful for AR applications, projector-camera systems, human-computer interaction systems, and so on.