Implementing Camshift on a Mobile Robot for Person Tracking and Pursuit

Abstract

In this paper we describe a Camshift implementation on mobile robotic system for tracking and pursuing a moving person with a monocular camera. Camshift algorithm uses color distribution information to track moving object. It is computationally efficient for working in real-time applications and robust to image noise. It can deal well with illumination changes, shadows and irregular objects motion (linear/non-linear). We compared the Camshift with a HSV color based tracking and our results show that the Camshift method outperformed the HSV color based tracking. Moreover, the former method is much more robust against different illumination conditions.