A Survey on Event-based Optical Marker Systems
This is an incremental survey that synthesizes existing research for researchers in robotics and machine perception.
This survey paper reviews Event-Based Optical Marker Systems (EBOMS), which combine event-based cameras with optical markers to tackle challenges in robotic vision, highlighting their asynchronous operation and robustness in adverse lighting conditions for applications like object detection and pose estimation.
The advent of event-based cameras, with their low latency, high dynamic range, and reduced power consumption, marked a significant change in robotic vision and machine perception. In particular, the combination of these neuromorphic sensors with widely-available passive or active optical markers (e.g. AprilTags, arrays of blinking LEDs), has recently opened up a wide field of possibilities. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review on Event-Based Optical Marker Systems (EBOMS). We analyze the basic principles and technologies on which these systems are based, with a special focus on their asynchronous operation and robustness against adverse lighting conditions. We also describe the most relevant applications of EBOMS, including object detection and tracking, pose estimation, and optical communication. The article concludes with a discussion of possible future research directions in this rapidly-emerging and multidisciplinary field.