Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 509597, 18 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/509597
Research Article

Adaptive Colour Feature Identification in Image for Object Tracking

1School of Computing, Engineering, and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia
2School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

Received 8 October 2012; Accepted 14 November 2012

Academic Editor: Sheng-yong Chen

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.