Active tracking using color silhouettes for indoor surveillance

Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras play an important role in surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose an active tracker using color silhouettes with a single camera. We firstly apply dilation and erosion operators of morphology to binary difference image to get color silhouettes. We also record the color silhouette of the target which we are interested in. Secondly, we measure the similarity of color silhouette between the observation and the candidates of silhouettes. We exploit the most similar one to update that of the tracked target. Finally, we control the PTZ camera to move according to the location of the tracked target. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively track people even though she/he is fully occluded.