A New Technique for Laser Spot Detection and Tracking by Using Optical Flow and Kalman Filter

Abstract

Laser spot is widely used in numerous fields such as pointing during presentations, guiding robots in human machine interaction (HCI), and guiding munitions to targets in military, etc. The interest of this paper is to develop an effective method for laser spot detection and tracking with exploiting fewer features. In this paper, a new technique jointly combined pyramid Lucas–Kanade (PLK) optical flow for detection and extended Kalman filter for accurately tracking laser spot in low-resolution and varying background video frames is presented. By using this new technique, only deploying intensity of laser spot with displacement of laser spot could get a very good result. This technique could be embedded into multi-core processing devices with inexpensive cost for potential high benefits in the future.