Follow-the-leader behaviour through optical flow minimization

Abstract

In this paper we present a mobile system for visual tracking, i.e., a mobile platform equipped with a TV camera, which is capable of following a human leader along complex trajectories. Differently from existing systems, which mainly rely on the detection of colour blobs or particular features/markers, our system is based on the detection of motion through optical flow computation, thus being implicitly able to follow both persons and other robots with different characteristics in terms of colour, shape, etc.