DotTracker

..going through old crap, I found this "DotTracker" program. It's something I wrote in undergrad for, um, tracking colored dots in video. Here's a description of the algorithm I found in a file appropriately labeled "writeup of algorithm.txt", though I can tell it's a rough draft, because the file has above it some text where I was obviously writing a new/better description, but never finished:

Orange Dot Tracking Algorithm

Consider a "tracker" to be an object capable of tracking a moving dot in a video sequence.

The tracker is defined by a center, a color, and a size:

center - the x,y position of the tracker within a frame of video; this variable is updated every frame

color - the color that the tracker is tracking; this variable is initialized to the color of the pixel that the user clicks on when "placing" a tracker. This variable NEVER CHANGES once it is initialized.

size - the algorithm essentially examines a square set of pixels centered around the "center" of the tracker; the "size" variable defines the size of this square.

The crux of the tracking algorithm is an update function which centers the tracker on a splotch of color.

Here's an image in that directory that I used for testing. Note that the dots on my arm are not orange, but green. Apparently the algorithm could track any color, not just orange ;)

The code is now on github: https://github.com/dglittle/DotTracker