Tracking Multiple Moving Targets using a Camera and Laser Rangefinder

Abstract

We propose a target tracking system based on a camera and laser rangender. Two trackers have been developed: a laser-based tracker and a vision-based tracker. They detect moving or bright-colored targets, and report the positions of the targets in a coordinate system rigidly attached to the sensors. Both trackers have been implemented and tested with stationary sensors embedded in an oce environment and mobile robots. 1 Introduction Target tracking is a well studied problem, especially in computer vision [1, 3, 4]. Vision-based moving-target trackers deal with a real world problem, but they require very high computation. In addition, the trackers are complicated when distance to a target needs to be computed. We have developed a simple target tracking system which uses a camera and laser rangender. Two trackers have been developed: a laser-based tracker and a vision-based tracker. Our trackers are relatively simple by design, and have several limitations. However, they provid...