Model-based visual tracking: the OpenTL framework

Abstract

Object tracking is a broad and important field in computer science, addressing the most different applications in educational, entertainment, as well as industrial and manufacturing areas. Since the early days of computer vision, the state-of-the-art of visual object tracking has greatly evolved, along with the available imaging devices and computing hardware technology. This book has two main goals: to provide a unified and structured overview of this everyday growing field, as well as proposing a corresponding software framework, the OpenTL library, developed at TUM-Informatik VI (Chair for Robotics and Embedded Systems). The main result of this work is to show, how most real-world application scenarios can be naturally cast into a common description vocabulary, and therefore implemented and tested in a fully modular and scalable way, through the definition of a layered, object-oriented software architecture. The resulting architecture covers in a seamless way all processing levels, from raw data acquisition up to model-based object detection and sequential localization, and defines, at the application level, what we call the tracking pipeline. Within this framework, extensive use of graphics hardware (GPU computing) as well as distributed processing, allows real-time performances for complex models and sensory systems.