A system tracks poses of a passive object using fiducial markers on fiducial surfaces of a polygonal structure of the object using image data captured by a camera. The system includes an object tracking controller that generates an estimated pose for a frame of the image data using an approximate pose estimation (APE), and then updates the estimated pose using a dense pose refinement (DPR) of pixels. The APE may include minimizing reprojection error between projected image points of the fiducial markers and observed image points of the fiducial markers in the frame. The DPR may include minimizing appearance error between image pixels of the fiducial markers in the frame and projected model pixels of the fiducial markers determined from the estimated pose and the object model. In some embodiments, an inter-frame corner tracking (ICT) of the fiducial markers may be used to facilitate the APE.