My task:
I have a task where I am asked to track parcels(carton boxes) of different dimensions moving on a conveyor. I am using Asus Xtion pro camera mounted on top of a conveyor in any inclined angle. I am looking for a model free object tracker that will detect boxes in the scene, track them & gives their 6 DOF? My target object is just a box and I want to eliminate all other things in the scene.
My approach:
I do Point cloud pre-processing like down-sampling, pass through filtering and segmentation. All these should give me a final point cloud containing only the objects on the conveyor.
I planned to make the "z" values in each point(depth value) as zero, thereby making the point cloud of the box to be flat on the ground.
I planned to transfer the view of the camera from any inclined position to a top down view so that I can view any number of carton boxes moving on the conveyor from a top down view. I feel the top down view will prevent perspective viewing problems
The process flow of step 2 and 3 is shown below.
- After the top down view of the point cloud is achieved, I need to convert the 3rd point cloud to 2nd image, so that I can perform object tracking with so many OpenCV based tracking algorithms available.
A Sample point cloud is shown below in different views
Original View from camera:
Point Cloud Target/Desired View for converting to 2nd: (The box is the target. All the ground plane and unnecessary points would be eliminated)
Is my approach correct? How will I achieve steps 2,3 and 4?