Robust tracking of ellipses at frame rate

The critical issue in vision-based control of motion is robust tracking at real time. A method is presented that tracks ellipses at field rate using a Pentium PC. Robustness is obtained by integrating gradient information and mode (intensity) values for the detection of edgels along the contour of the ellipse and by using a probabilistic (RANSAC-like, Fischler and Bolles, Commun. ACM 24(6) (1981) 381) method to find the most likely ellipse-shaped object. Detailed experiments document the capabilities and limitations of the approach and the robustness achieved. (C) 2000 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.