• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.1-8
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a two-stage head tracking algorithm adequate for real-time active camera system having pan-tilt-zoom functions. In the color convergence stage, we first assume that the shape of a head is an ellipse and its model color histogram is acquired in advance. Then, the min-shift method is applied to roughly estimate a target position by examining the histogram similarity of the model and a candidate ellipse. To reflect the temporal change of object color and enhance the reliability of mean-shift based tracking, the target histogram obtained in the previous frame is considered to update the model histogram. In the updating process, to alleviate error-accumulation due to outliers in the target ellipse of the previous frame, the target histogram in the previous frame is obtained within an ellipse adaptively shrunken on the basis of the model histogram. In addition, to enhance tracking reliability further, we set the initial position closer to the true position by compensating the global motion, which is rapidly estimated on the basis of two 1-D projection datasets. In the subsequent stage, we refine the position and size of the ellipse obtained in the first stage by using shape information. Here, we define a robust shape-similarity function based on the gradient direction. Extensive experimental results proved that the proposed algorithm performs head hacking well, even when a person moves fast, the head size changes drastically, or the background has many clusters and distracting colors. Also, the propose algorithm can perform tracking with the processing speed of about 30 fps on a standard PC.