Object tracking in cluttered background based on optical flow and edges

This paper describes a method of determining contours of moving objects in a cluttered scene by integrating optical flow and edges. If the motion of an object is similar to that of the background, the contour is not determined only by optical flow. If the background of a scene is cluttered, the contour is not determined only from edges because many edges may be extracted in the background and no edges may be extracted on some parts of the contour. In the proposed method, the contour is determined by using optical flow and edges in a long sequence. The whole contour of a moving object is eventually obtained by accumulating edges near motion boundaries over an image sequence. The method can also determine the occlusion relation of two overlapping objects by checking if edges exist on the predicted contours of objects. Experimental results for synthetic and real images show the usefulness of the method