A Method for Extracting Shape and Position of an Object using Partial M-array

This paper describes a new method for object extraction necessary for image tracking systems. The extraction method which this paper proposes here is that an M-array is set between a camera and the object and the obtained image including the object and M-array is pro-cessed for extracting the object. The image processing utilizes a characteristic of M-array which is robust to noise. When an M-array is overlapped on the object in background image, the object woud have a part of M-array, which is detected by use of partial correlation between the mosaic image of M-array and the standard M-array. Thus the shape and position of the object are extracted by extracting a common domain of width of high correlation value. Experiments are carried out by using an actual photo of Kumamoto city taken from an airplane as background, and by use of a rectangular and circular object. The results of experiment show a wide application of this method for practical image tracking systems.