Copyright © 2012 Feng Su et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Identification and tracking of a moving object using computer vision techniques is important in robotic surveillance. In this paper, an adaptive colour filtering method is introduced for identifying and tracking a moving object appearing in image sequences. This filter is capable of automatically identifying the most salient colour feature of the moving object in the image and using this for a robot to track the object. The method enables the selected colour feature to adapt to surrounding condition when it is changed. A method of determining the region of interest of the moving target is also developed for the adaptive colour filter to extract colour information. Experimental results show that by using a camera mounted on a robot, the proposed methods can perform robustly in tracking a randomly moving object using adaptively selected colour features in a crowded environment.