Disclosed are a system, apparatus, and method for in-situ creation of planar natural feature targets. In one embodiment, a planar target is initialized from a single first reference image one or more subsequent images are processed. In one embodiment, the planar target is tracked in six degrees of freedom upon the processing of the one or more subsequent images and a second reference image is selected from the processed one or more subsequent images. In one embodiment, upon selecting the second reference image the planar target is refined to a more accurate planar target.