Digital camera with orientation sensor for optical tracking of objects

摘要

An object tracking system has an inertial orientation sensor attached to a camera. The sensor uses a rigid body position and orientation (with or without markers) visible to the camera for determining the orientation and the position of the object in the global reference frame, when the camera is not rigidly fixed. Another orientation sensor is attached to the object in order to keep tracking of its orientation when a valid tracking of the object cannot be obtained from the camera. The data from the orientation sensor attached to the object and the data from the orientation sensor attached to the camera is used to increase the accuracy of the optical tracking of the object.

主权项

1. A method for optical object tracking, comprising:
placing an object to be tracked into a field of view of a camera, wherein the camera is not rigidly fixed; attaching a first orientation sensor to the camera; attaching a second orientation sensor to the object; connecting the first and second orientation sensors to a processor for their data to be processed by a sensor fusion algorithm; acquiring camera orientation data from the first orientation sensor and object orientation data from the second orientation sensor using a fusion filter; producing a fused object orientation data for tracking the object using the fusion filter based on the camera orientation data and the object orientation data; and generating an object heading based on the camera orientation data, and object pitch and roll angle from the fusion filter, and marker X and Y coordinates that are identified based on the image sensor of the camera.