Moving target tracking and measurement with a binocular vision system

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.