We investigate the effect of appearance variations on the detectability of vibration feature extraction with pixel-level digital filters for high-frame-rate videos. In particular, we consider robust vibrating object tracking, which is clearly different from conventional appearance-based object tracking with spatial pattern recognition in a high-quality image region of a certain size. For 512 × 512 videos of a rotating fan located at different positions and orientations and captured at 2000 frames per second with different lens settings, we verify how many pixels are extracted as vibrating regions with pixel-level digital filters. The effectiveness of dynamics-based vibration features is demonstrated by examining the robustness against changes in aperture size and the focal condition of the camera lens, the apparent size and orientation of the object being tracked, and its rotational frequency, as well as complexities and movements of background scenes. Tracking experiments for a flying multicopter with rotating propellers are also described to verify the robustness of localization under complex imaging conditions in outside scenarios.
Keywords: drone tracking; high-frame-rate video; object tracking; pixel-level digital filters; vibration source localization.