Detecting unique icon on video in real time

Question

For a project I am working on I'd like to be able to detect unique icons/barcodes in video footage. Suppose you have 10 people in the frame where each person is wearing a t-shirt with a similar but unique identifier (something like a barcode) and the programme is to detect each unique identifier.

Here are three options I'm working with now and associated drawbacks:

1. Using brute force feature matching (SURF, SIFT or ORB) - not sure how accurate this would be in real-world scenarios as people move and rotate so to if the identifiers are very similar can this still achieve good accuracy?
   2. Training tiny YOLO model. Now this seems like a good option but is not very scalable and it just seems like there's a simpler solution
   3. Simple template matching - is not a very good option due to changing perspective, size and angles

Any advise would be highly appreciated!

EDIT

I'd like to add some images for context. The idea is that each person would have a logo with a unique binary patter around it. See images below:

As you can see the two are similar but not the same due to the stripes around it.

I'm applying an Adoptive Gaussian Blur to it and getting 'barcode' like images that are clearly different

Now, it doesn't seem to me that normal SURF matching would be able to recognise the subtle difference in two images at least not reliably

Answer 1

Well, the first thing you need to consider about bar codes/QR Codes is that they are usually black with white background.

If T-Shirts or Unique tags are been used, they should follow this pattern (or any one). You should be able to easily detect these. Take for example this image processing class at the end there is a bar-code example, which here I reproduce:

0 - Given a image:

1 - You can binarize by converting to grayscale and then performing adaptive threshoulding, which is basically a clustering algorithm for pixels:

2 - Then you can filter blobs by eccentricity

3 - Then by major axis:

4 - And finally by orientation

This is a basic algorithm for segmenting bar-codes on hard surfaces. A T-shirt will render distorted bar-codes, but if you can narrow down the search region by detecting probable bar-codes in binary images you probably will get a large speed-up for then use of more complex algorithms such as the ones you propose.

Suggestions:

1 - Add a FCN to regenerate image distorted by T-Shirt surface before step (3) in the previous algorithm

2 - Train a CNN to detect bar-code blobs on binary images (substituting steps 2,3 and 4)

Update

I will add another answer since you changed a bit the question by giving examples. Your unique identifiers seen to be compose of a fixed center (equal to all identifiers) with concentric arcs of 3 different radius $r_1 < r_2 < r_3$ and the arcs with radius $r_2$ and $r_3$ are punctured with holes that are supposed to make them different from in each identifier.

You can use threshoulding and Hough transform to identify the circles, you can use the center as reference to calculate the angular distance between the holes. Then you can differ an identifier from another by:

• Counting holes and then
• Analyzing their angular distance

You can also use the arcs to predict/calculate the transformations suffered by the identifier by image distortions (rotation, shifting, non-linear transformation) and correct them.