Fourier Tag: A Smoothly Degradable Fiducial Marker System with Configurable Payload Capacity

We describe the design and implementation of a fiducial marker system that encodes data in the frequency spectrum of a synthetic image. This distinctive approach to marker synthesis and data encoding allows for partial data extraction in adverse imaging conditions, and can significantly extend the detection range through graceful data degradation. Additional digital encoding and image construction techniques are used to increase the payload capacity, and also to store 3-D pose information in each fiducial marker. This fiducial marker scheme can be configured to match the needs of the target application. We present several experiments investigating the practical range of various parameters as well as the performance of a specific instance of the system.