Person real-time tracking for video communication
Yihua Xu, Yunde Jia, Wanchun Liu · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
This paper presents a real-time head tracking method with a single black/white camera. This method mainly consists of two steps: block-based head tracking, and geometry-based correction. The block-based tracking method only uses low- level image information and can be used to track the free motion of the head. To improve the performance of block- based tracking during person turning around, we introduce a cylindrical model to approximate head, and extract features in the warped cylindrical surface. The correction step is introduced to address the shift caused by error accumulating of the block-based tracking method. This step utilizes the head contour geometry information, and measures the displacements between the head contour model and real contour in a current image, and hereby to correct the results of block tracking. We also set up a tracking system with a 350 megahertz microcomputer base on the proposed method, which operates at 30 frames per second with the tracking window size of 120 by 180 pixels and 80 tracking features.