Generating marker stars for 6D optical tracking

Visually tracking a large number of objects remains a trade-off between accuracy and amount of data. For applications where high accuracy in both position and orientation of points in space is required, optical tracking systems with passive marker systems are suitable. However, the placement of the marker dots remains problematic, as distin-guishability between the marker alignments considerably reduces data pre- or post processing, as objects can be identified by the marker geometry and the identity and pose of marked objects does not have to be reconstructed from prior frames. We propose a method which automatically generates a set of unique marker stars in a selectable quantity. The proposed method generates structures which can be built using standard rapid prototyping techniques and allow the measurement of the unconstrained and independent movement of a large number of objects with an optical tracking system. Resulting structures have proven to work well in our experiments.