CLOSING THE LOOP - DETECTION AND PURSUIT OF A MOVING OBJECT BY A MOVING OBSERVER

We present an integrated system which is able to pursue a moving objec t and maintain the object centered in the image by controlling a robot -head. The system contains three parts: independent motion detection, tracking, and control of a robot-head. This paper focuses on the detec tion mechanism, and briefly discusses the tracking and control issues. The system runs continuously in time and updates the object localizat ion at a frame-rate of 25 Hz. The moving object can be tracked, althou gh the observer performs an unknown independent motion, involving both translation and rotation. We focus on a simple motion detection algor ithm, since computational cost is of major importance for real-time sy stems with feedback. The algorithm is noniterative and computationally inexpensive. The running time complexity is O(n) for an image contain ing n pixels. The image-processing takes place on a MaxVideo200 pipeli ne processor, and the head control algorithm is running on a Transpute r T800 network. Some offline experimental results are presented, where comparisons are made between affine and translational image motion mo dels.