PTZ camera target tracking in large complex scenes

Abstract

This paper presents a real-time and automatic video tracking system with a single pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera. Compared with fixed camera, it can enlarge the surveillance area. By using three-dimensional background-weighted histogram in HSV color space, an improved mean-shift algorithm is proposed, and the algorithm can track target with multiple colors in real time. To keep the target in the center area of the camera's FOV, the information acquired from the tracking module is used to control PTZ camera actively. After the movement of the PTZ camera, the target is still in the center area of the camera's FOV. To realize the tracking to the same target, we employ the template matching method to find out the target. Based on motion history image (MHI), which provides the moving blob, a new tracking method is adopted to solve the strong maneuvering target tracking, partial occlusion or the erroneous template matching problem. Experimental results indicate that the system can perform well in large complex scenes.