Architecture of an Object-based Tracking System Using Colour Segmentation

Abstract

Tracking moving objects over time is a complex problem in computer vision and has been an important research subject over the past few years. Impressive tracking systems have been developed for some specific applications. The aim of this chapter is to present a robust specialized architecture for real time tracking, using color segmentation. Most of the existing object-tracking algorithms extract the features that constitute the object, and track them from one frame to another. The chapter proposes a new architecture to solve the tracking problem at object level. The first step is the extraction of the object from the scene. The proposed architecture uses the discriminatory properties of three color attributes—hue, saturation, and intensity—to segment the object. The second step consists of the computation of the centroid of the object by using the enhanced image from the segmentation module. As a last step, tracking of this centroid is achieved in a sequence of images. The processor presented in the chapter can provide the sequence of centroids at video rate.