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.

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.

"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.