A real-time color-based object tracking robust to irregular illumination variations

Color-based object tracking is an important issue since color is an efficient and robust visual cue for characterizing one object from the other objects. Color segmentation is, however, suffered from color variations induced from irregular illumination variations and the viewing geometry of a camera. This paper proposes a reliable color modeling approach including intensity information in HSI color space using B-spline curves based on the fact that the color distribution of a single-colored object, even in a hue-saturation plane, is not invariant with respect to brightness variations in practical cameras. By using the approach, our color-based visual tracker is able to adapt to irregular illumination variations and abrupt changes of brightness. The approach is applied to real-time face tracking under various illumination conditions in a PC-based vision system.