Title: Moving target tracking and measurement with a binocular vision system

Authors: T.W. Yang, K. Zhu, Q.Q. Ruan, J.D. Han

Addresses: Institute of Information Science, School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China. ' Institute of Information Science, School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China. ' Institute of Information Science, School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China. ' The State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China

Abstract: Visual tracking and measurement is one of the most important tasks in computer vision and finds applications in traffic surveillance, vision-guided mobile robots, etc. In this paper, a binocular vision system is used to achieve the visual servoing, mimicking the movements of human eyes. First, a robust scheme, which combines adaptive Background Subtraction (BS) and Camshift algorithms, is proposed to detect and track a moving object. Then, we discuss the problems of camera parameter calibration and position measurement of moving objects. A new approach is introduced to realise the extrinsic parameter calibration of a pan-tilt camera, providing successful tracking and accurate measurement of a moving target, even as it is outside the view of the camera. Numerous experiments have been done on the binocular vision system of a humanoid mobile platform, and the results show that the proposed approaches work very well.

Keywords: binocular vision; mobile robots; moving targets; target tracking; visual tracking; visual measurement; visual servoing; moving objects; object tracking; camera calibration; position measurement; humanoid mobile platforms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2010.034743

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2010 Vol.39 No.1/2/3, pp.145 - 152

Published online: 18 Aug 2010 *

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