AprilTag is a visual fiducial system designed for applications such as robotics, augmented reality, localisation and camera calibration.
Its markers can be produced with an ordinary printer and detected in camera images. From a detected tag, software can determine its identity together with its position and orientation relative to the camera. Unlike general-purpose two-dimensional barcodes, AprilTags carry relatively small data payloads and concentrate instead on reliable detection, accurate localisation and operation over useful viewing distances.
The detector is implemented as a compact C library with minimal dependencies. This helps make it suitable for embedding into robotics software and applications running on comparatively modest hardware.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Fast detector designed for real-time computer vision workloads.
- Improved detection of small tags and tags viewed at greater distances.
- Provides pose estimation for calculating a tag’s position and orientation relative to a calibrated camera.
- Includes standard square, circular and specialised tag families for different physical and identification requirements.
- Provides native ArUco-compatible tag families.
- Supports generation and use of custom tag families.
- Offers flexible tag layouts where data bits can extend outside the traditional border or leave holes within a tag.
- Integrates with OpenCV without requiring image data to be deep-copied.
- Exposes detector parameters for balancing processing speed, noise tolerance and detection distance.
- Provides helper functions for safely copying detector and detection structures in multi-threaded applications.
- Includes Python support, with additional third-party bindings available for other languages and environments.
Website: github.com/AprilRobotics/apriltag
Support:
Developer: APRIL Robotics Lab under the direction of Edwin Olson
License: BSD 2-Clause ‘Simplified’ License
AprilTag is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Robotics Software | |
|---|---|
| NASA Vision Workbench | Image processing in the context of machine vision |
| DART | Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit |
| Gazebo Sim | Robot simulation made easy |
| AprilTag | Visual fiducial system popular for robotics research |
| Webots | Multi-platform desktop application used to simulate robots |
| ROS | Software framework for building robot applications |
| ARGoS | Physics-based simulator designed to simulate robot swarms |
| RTAB-Map | Graph-based SLAM software for 3D mapping and navigation |
| MoveIt | Robotic manipulation platform for ROS 2 |
| OpenRTM-aist | Component-oriented development of robot systems |
| ROSboard | Lightweight web dashboard for visualizing ROS data |
| Vizanti | Web-based visualizer and mission planner for ROS robots |
| Choreonoid | Integrated graphical framework for robotics development |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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