An airborne Bayesian color tracking system

Mobile tracking systems are of wide interest. For instance sport photographers often hire helicopters to obtain close range images of e.g. aquatic athletes. Besides the high price for hiring a helicopter, good helicopter pilots are not everywhere available. One way to circumvent these problems is the use of a cheap model helicopter. Since flying a model helicopter is a demanding task, there are either two persons needed for the operation of the system (one person for steering the helicopter and the other for the operation of the camera), or alternatively an automatic tracking system can be used. In this work an automatic, image based tracking system is described. The algorithm combines color histograms as similarity measures with a particle filter and achieves fast and robust tracking results. A novel method for fast histogram computation is proposed. The system keeps the object of interest automatically in the viewing field of the camera so that the only task left to the camera operator is to initiate the imaging process. This simple task can be additionally managed by the helicopter pilot so that a single person is sufficient to steer the helicopter and to take the images.