C.DOT - Convolutional Deep Object Tracker for Augmented Reality Based Purely on Synthetic Data

Augmented reality applications use object tracking to estimate the pose of a camera and to superimpose virtual content onto the observed object. Today, a number of tracking systems are available, ready to be used in industrial applications. However, such systems are hard to handle for a service maintenance engineer, due to obscure configuration procedures. In this article, we investigate options towards replacing the manual configuration process with a machine learning approach based on automatically synthesized data. We present an automated process of creating object tracker facilities exclusively from synthetic data. The data is highly enhanced to train a convolutional neural network, while still being able to receive reliable and robust results during real world applications only from simple RGB cameras. Comparison against related work using the LINEMOD dataset showed that we are able to outperform similar approaches. For our intended industrial applications with high accuracy demands, its performance is still lower than common object tracking methods with manual configuration. Yet, it can greatly support those as an add-on during initialization, due to its higher reliability.