Design and implementation of a real-time pan-tilt visual tracking system

Due to the increasing need in the security and surveillance system, the problem of automatically tracking a moving target by a visual servo system is a research topic which deserves more investigation. Whether a visual tracking system can successfully track a moving target in real-time or not, it relies heavily on the performance of motion estimation technique. The region-based matching method and motion energy method are two of the existing popular motion estimation techniques. These two methods have been modified to meet the requirement of real-time execution in this study. In addition, a prototype real-time pan-tilt visual tracking system is developed as a test platform to investigate the performance of both methods. Experimental results indicate that both methods exhibit satisfactory performances.