Real-Time Object Tracking System on FPGAs

Object tracking is an important task in computer vision applications. One of the crucial challenges is the real-time speed requirement. In this paper we implement an object tracking system in reconfigurable hardware using an efficient parallel architecture. In our implementation, we adopt a background subtraction based algorithm. The designed object tracker exploits hardware parallelism to achieve high system speed. We also propose a dual object region search technique to further boost the performance of our system under complex tracking conditions. For our hardware implementation we use the Alter a Stratix III EP3SL340H1152C2 FPGA device. We compare the proposed FPGA-based implementation with the software implementation running on a 2.2 GHz processor. The observed speedup can reach more than 100X for complex video inputs.