An edge based visual tracking for target within complex environment

In this paper, a visual tracking system is proposed. The whole system is divided into two parts. The first part is the detection of the target and the second part is the trajectory filtering. To detect the target in the image, we use the method based on the distribution of edges. In this method, the template is edge based, and the distribution of edges of the image is extracted, so that the two are convolved to find the location of the target. The method is more reliable than the traditional template matching in the complicated scene. After finding the target in the image, we will control the camera platform to keep the target at the center of the image. The location of the target in the world coordinate frame is first transformed to the orientation relative to the camera whereby a tracking algorithm based on the IMM (interacting multiple model) algorithm is developed. The algorithm estimates the angular velocity and the angular acceleration of the target relative to the camera, which along with some error information in the images are used for control of the camera platform. Finally, a number of experiments are conducted to validate the developed visual tracker