Performance Improvement for Optical Tracking by Adapting Marker Arrangements

Marker-based rigid body configurations that are used with stereobased tracking systems are usually designed by trial-and-error method: the designer constructs a configuration, evaluates it in a given setup, and rearranges the marker positions within the configuration if necessary. Even though single ready-made rigid bodies permit sufficiently good tracking, it is not ensured that the corresponding arrangements of markers meet any quality criteria in terms of tracking robustness and reliability. Furthermore, it is unclear whether it is possible to add further rigid bodies to the setup which are sufficiently distinguishable from the given ones. In this paper, we present an approach to semi-automatically generate marker-based rigid bodies which contain optimal marker distances with respect to the properties of the tracking system for which they are used, e.g., granularity, accuracy, or jitter. Our procedure to support the design process as well as enhancing tracking generates configurations for several devices associated with an arbitrary set of point-based markers. We discuss the technical background of our approach as well as results of an evaluation by comparing the tracking quality of existing devices to rigid bodies generated by our approach. Furthermore, we outline further questions about improving tracking performance of stereo-based tracking systems only by redefining rigid bodies. Among others these aspects include occlusion problems, camera arrangements, and tracking accuracy.