Efficient tracking of a moving object using optimal representative blocks

In this paper, efficient tracking of a moving object using optimal representative blocks is implemented for a mobile robot with a pan-tilt camera. The key idea comes from the fact that when the image size of moving object is shrunk in an image frame according to the distance between the camera of mobile robot and the moving object, the tracking performance of a moving object can be improved by changing the size of representative blocks according to the object image size. Motion estimation using Edge Detection (ED) and Block-Matching Algorithm (BMA) is often used in the case of moving object tracking by vision sensors. However these methods often miss the real-time vision data since these schemes suffer from the heavy computational load. In this paper, the optimal representative block that can reduce a lot of data to be computed, is defined and optimized by changing the size of representative block according to the size of object in the image frame to improve the tracking performance. The proposed algorithm is verified experimentally by using a two degree-of-freedom active camera mounted on a mobile robot.