On-line object tracking for colour video analysis

Real-time object tracking is recently becoming more and more important in the field of video analysis and processing. Applications like traffic control, user-computer interaction, on-line video processing and production and video surveillance need reliable and economically affordable video tracking tools. It seems, however, that most of the available solutions are computationally intensive and sometimes require expensive video hardware, quite often without guaranteeing a suitable level of reliability. In this paper, we present a new approach to real-time object tracking from colour video sequences. It relies on contours in order to track the shape, position and orientation of objects, without exploiting snakes or "traditional" active contours. A closed-loop control approach is adopted to enforce motion tracking stability, while a separate shape model is maintained, featuring a two-stage model and a median filtering technique to cope with temporary occlusions and noise. The system was tested in several different environments with different constraints, and gave very encouraging performance. Experimental results are reported and commented on.