Chapter 5. Tracking Objects in Videos

Object tracking is one of the most important applications of computer vision. It can be used for many applications, some of which are as follows:

• Human–computer interaction: We might want to track the position of a person's finger and use its motion to control the cursor on our machines
• Surveillance: Street cameras can capture pedestrians' motions that can be tracked to detect suspicious activities
• Video stabilization and compression
• Statistics in sports: By tracking a player's movement in a game of football, we can provide statistics such as distance travelled, heat maps, and so on

In this chapter, you will learn the following topics:

• Optical flow
• Image Pyramids
• Global Motion Estimation
• The KLT tracker