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Head tracking using shapes and adaptive color histograms

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Abstract

A new method is presented for tracking a person’s head in real-time. The head is shaped as an ellipse, and the adaptively modified RGB color histogram is used to represent the tracked object (head). The method is composed of two parts. First, a robust nonparametric technique, called mean shift algorithm, is adopted for histogram matching to estimate the head’s location in the current frame. Second, a local search is performed after histogram matching to maximize the normalized gradient magnitude around the boundary of the elliptical head, so that a more accurate location and the best scale size of the head can be obtained. The method is demonstrated to be a real-time tracker and robust to clutter, scale variation, occlusion, rotation and camera motion, for several test sequences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, The Chinese Academy of Science, 100080, Beijing, P.R. China

    Liu Qingshan, Ma Songde & Lu Hanqing

Authors
  1. Liu Qingshan
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  2. Ma Songde
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  3. Lu Hanqing
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liu Qingshan.

Additional information

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.60135020).

LIU Qingshan was born in 1975. He received his B.E. degree from Chinese Textile University (now Dong Hua University) in 1997, M.S. degree from Southeast University in 2000. Now he is a Ph.D. candidate in the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition of Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His current research interests are image processing, human motion analysis, tracking and recognition.

MA Songde was born in 1946. He received the B.S. degree from Tsinghua University in 1968. He received the Ph.D. degree in 1983 and the “Doctorat D’Etat es Sciences” degree in 1986 from University Paris 6. He was an invited researcher in the Computer Vision Laboratory of University of Maryland, College Park, U.S.A. in 1983. He was a researcher in the Robot Vision Laboratory in INRIA, France in 1984–1986. Since 1986, he has been a research professor in the National Pattern Recognition Laboratory of the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was the president of the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1996–2000. He has been the vice-minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China since April 2000. He is a senior member of IEEE. His research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, robotics, and neural computing.

LU Hanqing was born in 1961. He received his B.E. degree and M.S. degree both from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1992. Since 1992, he has been with the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he is now a professor. His research interests include image processing, content-based image and video retrieval, object tracking and recognition.

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Liu, Q., Ma, S. & Lu, H. Head tracking using shapes and adaptive color histograms. J. Compt. Sci. & Technol. 17, 859–864 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02960777

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02960777

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