Abstract

This paper presents a method for tracking multiple skincolored objects in images acquired by a possibly moving camera. The proposed method encompasses a collection of techniques that enable the modeling and detection of skin-colored objects as well as their temporal association in image sequences. Skin-colored objects are detected with a Bayesian classifier which is bootstrapped with a small set of training data. Then, an off-line iterative training procedure is employed to refine the classifier using additional training images. On-line adaptation of skin-color probabilities is used to enable the classifier to cope with illumination changes. Tracking over time is realized through a novel technique which can handle multiple skin-colored objects. Such objects may move in complex trajectories and occlude each other in the field of view of a possibly moving camera. Moreover, the number of tracked objects may vary in time. A prototype implementation of the developed system operates on 320x240 live video in real time (28Hz) on a conventional Pentium 4 processor. Representative experimental results from the application of this prototype to image sequences are also provided