A real-time color feature tracking system using color histograms

Color feature tracking is based on pattern matching algorithms where the appearance of the target is compared with a reference model in successive images and the position of the target is estimated. The major drawback of these methods is that such operations require expensive computation power. It is bottleneck to implement real-time color feature tracking system. The probabilistic tracking methods have been shown to be robust and versatile for a modest computational cost. However, the probabilistic tracking methods break down easily when the object moves very fast because these methods search only the regions of interest based on the probability density function to estimate the position of the moving object. In this paper, we propose a real-time color feature tracking circuit. We propose a window-based image processing structure to improve the processing speed of the tracking circuit. The tracking circuit searches all regions of the image to perform a matching operation in order to estimate the position of the moving object. The main results of our work are that we have designed and implemented a physically feasible hardware circuit to improve the processing speed of the operations required for real-time color feature tracking. Therefore, this work has resulted in the development of a real-time color feature tracking system employing an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) implemented circuit designed by VHDL (the VHSIC Hardware Description Language). Its performance has been measured to compare with the equivalent software implementation.