Visual Tracking of Objects for a Mobile Robot using Point Snake Algorithm

Path Planning is one of the important fields in robot technologies. Local path planning may be done in on-line modes while recognizing an environment of robot by itself. In dynamic environments to obtain fluent information for environments vision system as a sensing equipment is a one of the most necessary devices for safe and effective guidance of robots. If there is a predictor that tells what future sensing outputs will be, robot can respond to anticipated environmental changes in advance. The tracking of obstacles has a deep relationship to the prediction for safe navigation. We tried to deal with active contours, that is snakes, to find out the possibilities of stable tracking of objects in image plane. Snakes are defined based on energy functions, and can be deformed to a certain contour form which would converge to the minimum energy states by the forces produced from energy differences. By using point algorithm we could have more speedy convergence time because the Brent's method gives the solution to find the local minima fast. The snake algorithm may be applied to sequential image frames to track objects in the images by these characteristics of speedy convergence and robust edge detection ability.