Closing the Loop: Pursuing a Moving Object by a Moving Observer

We present an integrated system, able to pursue a moving object by controlling a robot-head to maintain the moving object centered in the image. This system runs continuously in time and updates the object localization at a frame-rate of 25 Hz. The moving object can be tracked although the observer performs an unknown independent motion, involving both translation and rotation. We focus on a simple algorithm, since computational cost is of major importance for real-time systems with feedback. The algorithm is noniterative and computationally cheap. The running time complexity is O(n) for an image containing n pixels.