Creating a Real-Time Object Tracking Application with OpenCV and Python projects

TechieYan Technologies
2 min readJul 12, 2023

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Object tracking is a technique that involves locating and keeping track of the movement of an object in a given environment. It is a useful tool for a wide range of applications, including robotics, surveillance, and autonomous navigation. Object tracking can be done using various techniques, such as computer vision, infrared tracking, and radio frequency identification (RFID).

In this article, we will focus on how to create a real-time object-tracking application using OpenCV and Python. OpenCV is a computer vision library that contains a set of various functions for image processing and computer vision tasks. We will use the OpenCV library to track objects in a video stream, and the Python programming language to build the application.

First, we will need to install OpenCV and Python on our system. We can do this by following the instructions provided by the OpenCV website. Once OpenCV and Python are installed, we can begin writing the code for our application.

The first step is to capture the video stream from our camera. We can do this using the VideoCapture class of OpenCV. Once the video stream is captured, we can use the built-in functions of OpenCV to detect and track objects in the video stream. We can use the cv2.TrackerMIL_create() method to create an object tracker. This method takes in a few parameters, such as the parameters of the tracking algorithm and the type of tracking algorithm. After the tracker is created, we can use the cv2.TrackerMIL_update() method to update the tracked objects in the video stream.

Finally, we can display the tracked objects on the screen by using the cv2.imshow() method. This will display the tracked objects on the screen in real-time.

By following these steps, we can create a real-time object-tracking application using OpenCV and Python. This application can be used in a variety of applications, such as robotics, surveillance, and autonomous navigation.

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