Active Object Tracking based on stepwise application of Region and Color Information

An active object tracking algorithm using Pan and Tilt camera based in the stepwise application of region and color information from realtime image sequences is proposed. To reduce environment noises in input sequences, Gaussian filtering is performed first. An image is divided into background and objects by using the adaptive Gaussian mixture model. Once the target object is detected, an initial search window close to an object region is set up and color information is extracted from the region. We track moving objects in realtime by using the CAMShift algorithm which enables to trace objects in active camera with the color information. The proper tracking is accomplished by controlling the amount of pan and tilt to be placed the center position of object into the middle of field of view. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more effective than the hand-operated window method.