Object tracking is a direct or indirect key issue in many different military applications like visual surveillance, automatic visual closed-loop control of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and PTZ-cameras, or in the field of crowd evaluations in order to detect or analyse a riot emergence. Of course, a high robustness is the most important feature of the underlying tracker, but this is hindered significantly the more the tracker needs to have low calculation times. In the UAV application introduced in this paper the tracker has to be extraordinarily quick. In order to optimize the calculation time and the robustness in combination as far as possible, a highly efficient tracking procedure is presented for the above mentioned application fields which relies on well-known color histograms but uses them in a novel manner. This procedure bases on the calculation of a color weighting vector representing the significances of object colors like a kind of an object's color finger print. Several examples from the above mentioned military applications are shown to demonstrate the practical relevance and the performance of the presented tracking approach.

Date Published: 25 May 2011
PDF: 14 pages
Proc. SPIE 8020, Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Applications VIII, 80200R (25 May 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.884213

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8020:
Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Applications VIII
Daniel J. Henry; Beato T. Cheng; Dale C. Linne von Berg; Darrell L. Young, Editor(s)