Systems and methods for tracking the position of one or more head-mounted display (HMD) system components of an HMD system. The HMD components may carry a plurality of angle sensitive detectors or other types of detectors. The HMD system may be operative to detect corrupted position tracking samples, allowing such samples to be ignored, thereby improving the position tracking process. Control circuitry causes light sources to emit light according a specified pattern, and receives sensor data from the plurality of detectors. Control circuitry may process the sensor data, for example using machine learning or other techniques, to track a position of one or more HMD components.