3-D tracking of a moving object by an active stereo vision system

We present a 3D tracking method of an object which is moving in a complicated scene by an active stereo vision system. The system uses binocular vision robot, which can simulate the human eye movements. Gaze holding on an target object with the controlled cameras keeps the target's stereo disparity small, and simplifies the visual processing to locate the target for pursuit control. The novel feature of our tracking method is the disparity-based segmentation method of the target object. The method utilizes zero disparity filter and correlation to separate the target object with small disparity from distracting background. Furthermore, using correlation method to estimate stereo disparity makes it possible to fixate on a surface of the target object. We show the experimental results with the complicated scene to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.>