Object tracking is a broad and important fi eld in computer science, addressing
the most different applications in the educational, entertainment, industrial,
and manufacturing areas. Since the early days of computer vision, the state of
the art of visual object tracking has evolved greatly, along with the available
imaging devices and computing hardware technology.
This book has two main goals: to provide a unifed and structured overview of this growing field, as well as to propose a corresponding software framework, the OpenTL library, developed by the author and his working group at TUM-Informatik.
The main objective of this work is to show, how most real-world application scenarios can be naturally cast into a common description vocabulary, and therefore implemented and tested in a fully modular and scalable way, through the defnition of a layered, object-oriented software architecture.The resulting architecture covers in a seamless way all processing levels, from raw data acquisition up to model-based object detection and sequential localization, and defines, at the application level, what we call the tracking pipeline. Within this framework, extensive use of graphics hardware (GPU computing) as well as distributed processing, allows real-time performances for complex models and sensory systems.