An Active Head Tracking System for Distance Education and Videoconferencing Applications

We present a system for automatic head tracking with a single pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera. In distance education the PTZ tracking system developed can be used to follow a teacher actively when s/he moves in the classroom. In other videoconferencing applications the system can be utilized to provide a close-up view of the person all the time. Since the color features used in tracking are selected and updated online, the system can adapt to changes rapidly. The information received from the tracking module is used to actively control the PTZ camera in order to keep the person in the camera view. In addition, the system implemented is able to recover from erroneous situations. Preliminary experiments indicate that the PTZ system can perform well under different lighting conditions and large scale changes.