A Moving Target Detection and Localization Strategy Based on Optical Flow and Pin-hole Imaging Methods Using Monocular Vision

This paper proposes a new strategy for moving target detection and localization based on monocular vision. Firstly, to detect a moving target with large displacement and high speed accurately, two consecutive video images captured by a monocular camera are preprocessed using the enhancement and denoising methods. Then, the optical flow representing motion information is calculated iteratively by the modified Lucas-Kanade optical flow method. Secondly, a new interest region extraction method is developed to overcome the negative impacts caused by the noises in the background. Specifically, this proposed method combines a two-level image segmentation strategy from coarse to fine, including median filtering, two-direction dynamic threshold segmentation, the Otsu method, and morphological processing. Thirdly, a low computational cost target localization algorithm is proposed based on pin-hole imaging theory. Besides, it only uses two-dimensional image and camera parameters to obtain the moving target's position in the three-dimensional space. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed strategy can effectively eliminate noise interferences and realize moving target detection, extraction, and localization.