Visual tracking without feedback control
M. Ali Taalebinezhaad, Denis J. M. Poussart · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
A typical robot vision scenario might involve a vehicle moving with an unknown 3D motion (translation and rotation) while taking intensity images of an arbitrary environment. This paper describes the theory and implementation issues of constructing a sequence of tracked images in which a desired point in the environment is tracked using an image sequence with arbitrary motion. This method is performed fully in software without any need to mechanically move the camera relative to the vehicle. This tracking technique is simple and inexpensive. Furthermore, it does not use either optical flow or feature correspondence. Instead, the spatio- temporal gradients of the input intensity images are used directly. We have also introduced the gradient maps as an intuitive way of visually representing spatio-temporal brightness gradients. We used such gradient maps to qualitatively examine the quality of our constructed image sequence. The experimental results presented support the idea of tracking in software. The final result is a sequence of tracked images where the desired point is kept stationary in the images independent of the nature of the relative motion that occurred.