Efficient Object Tracking System Using the Fusion of a CCD Camera and an Infrared Camera

Abstract

To make a robust object tracking and identifying system for an intelligent robot and/or home system, heterogeneous sensor fusion between visible ray system and infrared ray system is proposed. The proposed system separates the object by combining the ROI (Region of Interest) estimated from two different images based on a heterogeneous sensor that consolidates the ordinary CCD camera and the IR (Infrared) camera. Human's body and face are detected in both images by using different algorithms, such as histogram, optical-flow, skin-color model and Haar model. Also the pose of human body is estimated from the result of body detection in IR image by using PCA algorithm along with AdaBoost algorithm. Then, the results from each detection algorithm are fused to extract the best detection result. To verify the heterogeneous sensor fusion system, few experiments were done in various environments. From the experimental results, the system seems to have good tracking and identification performance regardless of the environmental changes. The application area of the proposed system is not limited to robot or home system but the surveillance system and military system.