Event-Based high-speed low-latency fiducial marker tracking
This addresses the problem of high-speed, low-latency tracking for robotic applications like visual servoing, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles robust pose estimation in dynamic environments by proposing an end-to-end pipeline for real-time, low-latency 6-DoF fiducial marker tracking, achieving pose estimation at up to 156 kHz with an average latency of 3 ms using only CPU resources.
Motion and dynamic environments, especially under challenging lighting conditions, are still an open issue for robust robotic applications. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end pipeline for real-time, low latency, 6 degrees-of-freedom pose estimation of fiducial markers. Instead of achieving a pose estimation through a conventional frame-based approach, we employ the high-speed abilities of event-based sensors to directly refine the spatial transformation, using consecutive events. Furthermore, we introduce a novel two-way verification process for detecting tracking errors by backtracking the estimated pose, allowing us to evaluate the quality of our tracking. This approach allows us to achieve pose estimation at a rate up to 156~kHz, while only relying on CPU resources. The average end-to-end latency of our method is 3~ms. Experimental results demonstrate outstanding potential for robotic tasks, such as visual servoing in fast action-perception loops.