Predicting and estimating the accuracy of n-occular optical tracking systems

Marker-based optical tracking systems are widely used in augmented reality, medical navigation and industrial applications. We propose a model for the prediction of the target registration error (TRE) in these kinds of tracking systems by estimating the fiducial location error (FLE) from two-dimensional errors on the image plane and propagating that error to a given point of interest. We have designed a set of experiments in order to estimate the actual parameters of the model for any given tracking system. We present the results of a study which we used to demonstrate the effect of different sources of error. The method is applied to real applications to show the usefulness for any kind of augmented reality system. We also present a set of tools that can be used to visualize the accuracy at design time.