Sheet tracking

Question

I want to track a moving sheet. Its shape changes and occlusion occur because there are other leaves. What feature should I use to distinguish this leaf from other leaves. Thanks.

Answer 1

Condensation may be the algorithm you are looking for. He is able to track the boundaries of objects in a heavily cluttered background. On this page you will find an example of leaf tracking and one thesis about subtleties.

Answer 2

You need some kind of global / local tracking method that has weights for terms such as spatial consistency (how much is it moved relative to another), shape consistency (how much is it moved) and penalties for merging / splitting tracks.

A similar problem is associated with cell tracking in biomedical imaging. Some links from this conference here may be helpful.

Edit:

bjoernz makes a wonderful point in the comments. If you can add some form of fiducials to the scene, the task will be much simpler.

It does not even have to be a visible wavelength signal. For example, you can draw a sheet with infrared reflective paint and use an IR camera to select it. The IR camera can be aimed with the usual visible wavelength.

For a clean regular vision solution, my answer is above.