Movies of Object Tracking software

These movies are for Object Tracking Software.

1. Simple Camshift




2. Simple Camshift (Pocky, Camera:fixed)




3. Hybrid method with Gaussian (Pocky, Camera:fixed)





4. Hybrid method with Median (Pocky, Camera:fixed)




5. Hybrid method with Median (Hough Transform)

Object Tracking -Shelf Detection & Camshift -

I incorporated Hough Transform component and Object Tracking component (Camshift). What I made is a hybrid object tracking system of shelf-detection and Camshift.
Shelf-detection component sends Camshift component camera displacement data observed, and Camshift component tracks the item, using the data for setting an initial region to search the item.
And then, shelf-detection component start the observation of the shelf near the item location tracked by Camshift component.

Here is a screen shot of the software. In this case, "Pocky"(Japanese famous chocolate cookie) is the target.


Unfortunately, the result was a disappointing one. The shelf-detection isn't accurate enough to track the object effectively, while Camshift component is working well.

I wonder if I should give up using Hough Transform for shelf-detection...

Moving Average of "middle point"s & Filters

I modified the program using 5-point moving average of "middle point"s, instead of "middle point" itself, for observation of displacement and direction of the camera's motion.

It works to stabilize the detection of "middle point". But It might not be enough.
Now I use a Gaussian filter to suppress noises as pre-processing. Gaussian filters also make edges muddy. So I tried to find another filter to improve the situation.

[Median Filter]
This filter is effective for eliminating pepper & salt noises and remains edges sharp. It's great simply for edge detection. However, in this case, it might increase the number of edge points for Hough-Transform processing, and slow down the process.

[Bilateral Filter]
This is a kind of non-linear filter. Pixels having similar values in a certain region are unified to have the same value. If it's applied again and again, it will change real images into illustration like image. This filter is likely to work effectively to detect the edge of shelves. The problem is it needs much power to process. I'm afraid that it's not possible to use in real-time, though it might be useful to detect the color of the edge of shelves in initial process.

I should keep trying to find better filters, while I'm working on incorporating Hough-Transform component into object tracking algorithm.