ChromaTag: A Colored Marker and Fast Detection Algorithm

Introduction

ChromaTag is a colored fiducial marker and fast detection algorithm. It was originally published in ICCV 2017 (see citation below). This is the location of the source that is actively being developed. If you want the latest stable version, you can download it from here. The current set of priority development tasks for ChromaTag are:

Testing multi-marker detection
Testing inter-marker confusion
Tag generation tools
Color calibration tool to generate markers for specific lighting conditions
Additional Tag Families (36H11)

You can contact Joseph DeGol ([email protected]) with any questions, problems, or suggestions.

License

ChromaTag is released under the MIT License (see the LICENSE file for details). OpenCV, which is required to build and run ChromaTag, is released under the BSD 3-Clause license.

Citing ChromaTag

If you find ChromaTag useful, please consider citing:

@inproceedings{DeGol:ICCV:17,
  author    = {Joseph DeGol and Timothy Bretl and Derek Hoiem},
  title     = {ChromaTag: A Colored Marker and Fast Detection Algorithm},
  booktitle = {ICCV},
  year      = {2017}
}

Source

Follow the steps below to install dependencies (common and OpenCV) before building ChromaTag.

Common

These are common Unix libraries used to build c++ programs from source.

sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install cmake
sudo apt-get install pkg-config

OpenCV

OpenCV is required to build and run ChromaTag. These instructions are adapted from the this OpenCV tutorial.

First, download OpenCV 3.1.0 or higher: https://github.com/Itseez/opencv/archive/3.1.0.zip.

Next, Install these packages:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev 
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev 
sudo apt-get install libavformat-dev 
sudo apt-get install libswscale-dev
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-numpy 
sudo apt-get install libtbb2 libtbb-dev 
sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev 
sudo apt-get install libpng-dev 
sudo apt-get install libtiff-dev 
sudo apt-get install libjasper-dev 
sudo apt-get install libdc1394-22-dev

Finally, build OpenCV

unzip opencv-3.1.0.zip
cd opencv-3.1.0
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..
make -j4
sudo make install

OpenCV should now be installed in your system. If you choose to download a different version from 3.1.0, change the text above appropriately. If these instructions do not work for your version of OpenCV, please check the OpenCV provided tutorial for your version because there may be small differences.

ChromaTag

To clone and build ChromaTag, move to a directory where you want the ChromaTag source to live and then run the following commands in a Unix terminal.

git clone https://github.com/CogChameleon/ChromaTag.git
cd ChromaTag
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make -j

The built executables will be in .../build/bin and the libraries will be in .../build/lib.

cd build/bin
ls

Usage

A run script is provided to process the toy images. This script uses the Run_ChromaTag_Detector program in .../build/bin. To run the script, type:

cd ChromaTag/Scripts
bash Run_ChromaTag.sh

The script is useful in seeing the default way to process images in a folder. There are other options for processing (e.g. processing a list of images or an LCM stream). To run with no images and see the menu, type:

cd ChromaTag/build/bin
./Run_ChromaTag_Detector --help

Data

Some toy data is provided with the repository to ensure things are running correctly. Here are links to some additional datasets: