Real-time tracking and stereo vision-based control of a goldfish-catching system

Abstract

Designing a real-time visual tracking system to catch goldfishes is a very complex task because a fish's precise relative 3D positions inside a water tank are difficult to determine. In this paper, we present a new visual servo control system using stereo vision to acquire the 3D positions of goldfishes. The continuously adaptive mean shift (CAMSHIFT) algorithm and optical flow vision tracking methods are applied to provide feedback of a tracked fish's real-time position and motion trajectory in a water tank at a high frame-rate. Two lowcost, well calibrated cameras are used to track the goldfishes and a 5-axis robot manipulator is used to catch a specified goldfish. The designed visual tracking and servo system is less sensitive to lighting influences and thus performs more efficiently. Experiments of the proposed method yielded very good results as the real-time 3D vision successfully tracked two fishes and guided the manipulator to catching one of them in a net attached to its end-effector.