Patent ID: 6985179

Claim:
A method, comprising: preprocessing a video image from a video camera to separate one or more objects to be tracked from the rest of the video image and compute statistics for the one or more objects to be tracked and the rest of the video image, wherein said preprocessing includes computing color statistics for said one or more objects to be tracked, removing said one or more objects to be tracked from a background of the video image, wherein said removing includes selecting one object of the one or more objects to be tracked, selecting a pixel within the selected object, identifying the selected pixel as a pixel belonging to the selected object if the difference between hue of the pixel and mean hue of the selected object is within an allowable range for hue, the difference between saturation of the pixel and mean saturation of the selected object is within an allowable range for saturation, and the horizontal and vertical distances of the pixel from the center of the selected object are within an allowable range for distance, and identifying a pixel as belonging to the background of the video image if the difference between hue of the pixel and the mean hue of the selected object is not within said allowable range for hue, the difference between saturation of the pixel and the mean saturation of the object selected is not within said allowable range for saturation, and the horizontal and vertical distances of the pixel from the center of the selected object are not within said allowable range for distance, and computing color statistics for said background of the video image; generating a quality measure based on the statistics for the one or more objects to be tracked and the rest of the video image that indicates the suitability of the video image for use by an object tracking system; and tuning said video camera to increase said quality measure beyond a threshold.