Visual tracking of a moving target using active contour based SSD algorithm

This paper presents a new image based visual tracking scheme for a mobile robot to trace a moving target using a single camera mounted on the mobile robot. To accurately estimate the position of the target in the next image, it decomposes the effect of the camera motion on the velocity vector of the target in the image frame. Based on the estimated velocity of the target and the image Jacobian, the control inputs of the mobile robot are determined in such a way that the target may appear inside the central area of the image frame. Since the shape of the target in the image frame varies due to rotation and translation of the target, a new shape adaptive Sum-of-Squared Difference (SSD) algorithm is proposed which uses the extended snake algorithm to extract the contour of the target and updates the template in every step of the matching process. The proposed scheme has been implemented using a Nomad Scout Robot II. The experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme follows the target within a negligible error range even when the target is temporarily lost due to various reasons.