Building an interactive object tracker

Colorspace based tracker gives us the freedom to track a colored object, but we are also constrained to a predefined color. What if we just want to pick an object at random? How do we build an object tracker that can learn the characteristics of the selected object and just track it automatically? This is where the CAMShift algorithm, which stands for Continuously Adaptive Meanshift, comes into the picture. It's basically an improved version of the Meanshift algorithm.

The concept of Meanshift is actually nice and simple. Let's say we select a region of interest and we want our object tracker to track that object. In that region, we select a bunch of points based on the color histogram and compute the centroid. If the centroid lies at the center of this region, we know that the object hasn't moved. But if the centroid is not at the center of this region, then we know that the object is moving in some direction. The movement of the centroid controls the...