From ekalic2
The name “Predator” itself evokes relentless tracking of a prey, in this case, any object, face, finger, etc. in real-time and at seemingly lightning speed. The software also learns, and so gets better with time.
The real name of “Predator” is Tracking-Learning-Detection (TLD), the branchild and PhD thesis of Zdenek Kalal of the University of Surrey, UK. TLD is an algorithm for tracking of an object which is bound by a box. TLD simultaneously tracks the object, learns its appearance, and detects it whenever it appears. The result is a real-time tracking that learns from its errors and improves over time, making it ideal for people with motor disabilities.
Practical uses include human-computer interfaces (e.g. virtual mouse), face recognition (security devices), visual search, tracking a vehicle using an airborne camera, tracking of [rare] animals, and object-centric video stabilization.
source popsci
The ALIEN Visual Tracker application IS OUT!
Download it here: http://www.micc.unifi.it/pernici/
(available for Windows7 64bit).
The ALIEN visual tracker is a generic visual object tracker achieving state of the art performance. The object is selected at run-time by drawing a bounding box around it and then its appearance is learned and tracked as time progresses. The ALIEN tracker has been shown to outperform other competitive trackers, especially in the case of long-term tracking, large amount of camera blur, low frame rate videos and severe occlusions including full object disappearance.
The scientific paper introducing the technology behind the tracker will appear at the 12th European Conference in Computer Vision 2012 under the following title:
• FaceHugger: The ALIEN Tracker Applied to Faces. In Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) – DEMO Session — 2012 Florence Italy.
A real time demo of the released downloadable application (http://www.micc.unifi.it/pernici/) will also be given during the conference [1].
Video demos showing the capability of this novel technology may be seen here http://www.youtube.com/user/pernixVision.