In the past few years, the widespread use of 3D printing technology enables the growth of the market of 3D printed products. On Esty, a website focused on handmade items, hundreds of individual entrepreneurs are selling their 3D printed products. Inspired by the positive effects of machine-readable tags, like barcodes, on daily product marketing, we propose AnisoTag, a novel tagging method to encode data on the 2D surface of 3D printed objects based on reflection anisotropy. AnisoTag has an unobtrusive appearance and much lower extraction computational complexity, contributing to a lightweight low-cost tagging system for individual entrepreneurs. On AnisoTag, data are encoded by the proposed tool as reflective anisotropic microstructures, which would reflect distinct illumination patterns when irradiating by collimated laser. Based on it, we implement a real-time detection prototype with inexpensive hardware to determine the reflected illumination pattern and decode data according to their mapping. We evaluate AnisoTag with various 3D printer brands, filaments, and printing parameters, demonstrating its superior usability, accessibility, and reliability for practical usage.

翻译：近年来，3D打印技术的广泛应用推动了三维打印产品市场的增长。在专注于手工制品的网站Etsy上，数百名个人创业者正在销售其3D打印产品。受条形码等机器可读标签对日常产品营销积极作用的启发，我们提出了一种基于反射各向异性的新型标签方法AnisoTag，用于在3D打印物体的二维表面编码数据。AnisoTag具有不显眼的外观和极低的提取计算复杂度，为个人创业者构建了轻量级低成本标签系统。在AnisoTag中，数据通过所提工具编码为反射各向异性微结构，当受到准直激光照射时，这些微结构会反射出独特的照明图案。基于此，我们利用廉价硬件实现了实时检测原型，用于确定反射照明图案并依据其映射关系解码数据。我们通过不同3D打印机品牌、耗材和打印参数对AnisoTag进行了评估，证明了其在实际应用中的优越易用性、可访问性和可靠性。