A robust visual servo system for tracking an arbitrary-shaped object by a new active contour method

This work presents a real-time, highly reliable, open field visual tracking system, which can automatically detect an arbitrary-shaped object in 3D space and find out its location so that the camera platform can be controlled to keep the target centered in the monitor image. Even if the object goes through highly cluttered environment or is occluded by other objects, the system should not fail to work properly, and the total processing period is less than 34 ms. The overall system consists of a motion detector, a snake-based outline extraction, a hybrid tracking methodology, and a VPDA filter which evolves from probabilistic data association filter (PDA filter). At last, the effective functionality of the visual servo system is confirmed by a series of experiments.