Moving object tracking based on mobile robot vision

The paper describes a robotic application that tracks a moving object by utilizing a mobile robot with capacity of avoiding obstacles. Real-time tracking algorithm is based on mobile robot vision using adaptive color matching and Kalman filter. Adaptive color matching is used to obtain motion vectors of moving object in the robot coordinate system. It can adjust color matching threshold adaptively to reduce the influence of lighting variations in the scene. Kalman filter is applied to design a view window. View window, which contains the next position of the moving object estimated by Kalman filter, is determined on image plane to reduce the image processing area. Color matching threshold can adjust itself adaptively in view window. A virtual targets based algorithm is also presented for real-time obstacle avoidance in this paper. Experimental results show that the tracking algorithm can adapt to lighting variations and has good tracking precision. It can also avoid obstacles smoothly while tracking moving object. Furthermore, it can be implemented in real time.