Robust identification of fiducial markers in challenging conditions

•This work tackles the marker identification process as a classification problem.•Methodology proposed to train the classifiers with a synthetic dataset of markers.•Our proposal can identify markers under very difficult image conditions.•The proposed method performs significantly better than previous approaches. Many intelligent systems, such as assistive robots, augmented reality trainers or unmanned vehicles, need to know their physical location in the environment in order to fulfill their task. While relying exclusively on natural landmarks for that task is the preferred option, their use is somewhat limited because the proposed methods are complex, require high computational power, and are not reliable in all environments. On the other hand, artificial landmarks can be placed in order to alleviate these problems. In particular, square fiducial markers are one of the most popular tools for camera pose estimation due to their high performance and precision. However, the state-of-the-art methods still perform poorly under difficult image conditions, such as camera defocus, motion blur, small scale or non-uniform lighting. This paper proposes a method to robustly detect this type of landmarks under challenging image conditions present in realistic scenarios. To do so, we re-define the marker identification problem as a classification one based on state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. Second, we propose a procedure to create a training dataset of synthetically generated images affected by several challenging transformations. Third, we show that, in this problem, a classifier can be trained using exclusively synthetic data, performing well in real and challenging conditions. Different types of classifiers have been tested to prove the validity of our proposal (namely, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM)), and statistical analyses have been performed in order to determine the best approach for our problem. Finally, the obtained classifiers have been compared to the ArUco and AprilTags fiducial marker systems in challenging video sequences. The results obtained show that the proposed method performs significantly better than previous approaches, making the use of this technology more reliable in a wider range of realistic scenarios such as outdoor scenes or fast moving cameras.