Design and implementation of visual servoing system for realistic air target tracking

A real-time visual tracking system based on our proposed motion estimation algorithm is developed. The proposed motion estimation algorithm is used to predict the location of the target and then generate a control input so as to keep the target stationary in the center of image. The work differs from previous ones in that it is able to decouple the estimation of motion from the estimation of structure. The major contribution of this work is that simple, none computation intensive, correspondence-free, and numerically stable 3D motion estimation algorithms are developed. The robust target detection method in simple environment and a time reduction of the sum of squared difference method in a complex environment are minor contributions. The visual tracking system can achieve at a rate of 30 Hz. The robustness of the visual tracking system is validated by a number of experiments.