Moving Object Tracking Based on Sparse Optical Flow with Moving Window and Target Estimator

Moving object detection and tracking are technologies applied to wide research fields including traffic monitoring and recognition of workers in surrounding heavy equipment environments. However, the conventional moving object detection methods have faced many problems such as much computing time, image noises, and disappearance of targets due to obstacles. In this paper, we introduce a new moving object detection and tracking algorithm based on the sparse optical flow for reducing computing time, removing noises and estimating the target efficiently. The developed algorithm maintains a variety of corner features with refreshed corner features, and the moving window detector is proposed to determine the feature points for tracking, based on the location history of the points. The performance of detecting moving objects is greatly improved through the moving window detector and the continuous target estimation. The memory-based estimator provides the capability to recall the location of corner features for a period of time, and it has an effect of tracking targets obscured by obstacles. The suggested approach was applied to real environments including various illumination (indoor and outdoor) conditions, a number of moving objects and obstacles, and the performance was evaluated on an embedded board (Raspberry pi4). The experimental results show that the proposed method maintains a high FPS (frame per seconds) and improves the accuracy performance, compared with the conventional optical flow methods and vision approaches such as Haar-like and Hog methods.