In situ active marker generation for markerless tracking on featureless surfaces using persistent luminescence

We propose a markerless tracking method for featureless surfaces by exploiting the persistent luminescence of everyday materials such as wood, paper, and fabric. UV laser irradiation dynamically generates active markers on the target surface without any physical attachment or chemical treatment. Luminescence spectra and camera-based detection limits were characterized for ten solid materials. Luminescence is detected via a 3σ-based criterion, and its centroid is tracked across successive frames using Otsu's binarization and phase correlation to estimate the target velocity. Experiments on a linear actuator at 40 and 80 mm/s demonstrated successful tracking across all selected materials, achieving error rates of less than 10%, while feature-point-based methods failed on textureless samples. Because the persistent-luminescence signal is much weaker than typical broad-spectrum ambient illumination, the proposed technique is intended for dark-box, enclosed, or low-light environments, or for systems whose lighting is selected to leave a spectral window at the luminescence peak.