PC-Based Vision System with Pan-Tilt Platform for Face Tracking

Face tracking has emerged as an area of research with exciting possibilities. This paper describes a fully tested prototype system for face tracking which uses a web-cam as sensor, incorporated with a closed-loop visual feedback control system for the pan-tilt mechanism. Continuous adaptive mean shift (CamShift) algorithm, has been adopted to perform the face tracking task. The algorithm, which is simple and computationally efficient, operates on a 2D colour probability distribution image produced from histogram back-projection and it is designed for dynamically changing distributions. The performance of the prototype has been very satisfactory and can be implemented in real-time application.