A low cost one-camera optical tracking system for indoor wide-area augmented and virtual reality environments

In the last years the number of industrial applications for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) environments has significantly increased. Optical tracking systems are an important component of AR/VR environments. In this work, a low cost optical tracking system with adequate attributes for professional use is proposed. The system works in infrared spectral region to reduce optical noise. A highspeed camera, equipped with daylight blocking filter and infrared flash strobes, transfers uncompressed grayscale images to a regular PC, where image pre-processing software and the PTrack tracking algorithm recognize a set of retro-reflective markers and extract its 3D position and orientation. Included in this work is a comprehensive research on image pre-processing and tracking algorithms. A testbed was built to perform accuracy and precision tests. Results show that the system reaches accuracy and precision levels slightly worse than but still comparable to professional systems. Due to its modularity, the system can be expanded by using several one-camera tracking modules linked by a sensor fusion algorithm, in order to obtain a larger working range. A setup with two modules was built and tested, resulting in performance similar to the stand-alone configuration.