Moving object detection, tracking and following using an omnidirectional camera on a mobile robot

Equipping mobile robots with an omnidirectional camera is very advantageous in numerous applications as all information about the surrounding scene is stored in a single image frame. In the given context, the present paper is concerned with detection, tracking and following of a moving object with an omnidirectional camera. The camera calibration and image formation is based on the spherical unified projection model thus yielding a representation of the omnidirectional image on the unit sphere. Detection of moving objects is performed by calculating a sparse optical flow in the image and then lifting the flow vectors on the unit sphere where they are discriminated as dynamic or static by analytically calculating the distance of the terminal vector point to a great circle arc. The flow vectors are then clustered and the center of gravity is calculated to form the sensor measurement. Furthermore, the tracking is posed as a Bayesian estimation problem on the unit sphere and the solution based on the von Mises-Fisher distribution is utilized. Visual servoing is performed for the object following task where the control law calculation is based on the projection of a point on the unit sphere. Experimental results obtained by a camera with a fish-eye lens mounted on a differential drive mobile robot are presented and discussed.