tracking a leaf

I want to tra开发者_StackOverflowck a moving leaf. Its shape changes and occlusion happens because there are other leaves also. What feature should I use to differentiate this leaf among other leaves. Thanks.

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You want some type of global/local tracking method that has weights for terms like spatial coherence (how much one has moved relative to another), shape coherence (how much it moved), and penalties for merging/division of tracks.

A similar problem is cell tracking in biomedical imaging. Some references from this conference here, for instance, might be useful.

Edit:

bjoernz makes an excellent point in the comments. If you can add some form of fiducials to the scene, the task will be much easier.

It need not even be a visible wavelength signal. You can paint the leaf with IR reflective paint and use an IR camera to pick it up, for example. The IR camera can be bore-sighted with the regular visible wavelength camera.

For a pure regular vision solution, my answer above stands.

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"Condensation" might be the algorithm that you're looking for. It is able to track object boundaries in highly cluttered backgrounds. On this page you will find an example of tracking a leaf and one thesis on the intricacies.