Motion tracking with an active camera

Abstract

This paper describes a method for real-time motion detection using an active camera mounted on a pan/tilt platform. Image mapping is used to align images of different viewpoints so that static camera motion detection can be applied. In the presence of camera position noise, the image mapping is inexact and compensation techniques fail. The use of morphological filtering of motion images is explored to desensitize the detection algorithm to inaccuracies in background compensation, Two motion detection techniques are examined, and experiments to verify the methods are presented. The system successfully extracts moving edges from dynamic images even when the pan/tilt angles between successive frames are as large as 3.