A method was presented to implement the detecting and tracking of moving targets through omnidirec-tional vision. The method combined optical flow with particle filter arithmetic, in which optical flow field was used to detect and locate moving targets and particle filter was used to track the detected moving objects. According to the circular image character of omnidirectional vision, the calculation equation of optical flow field and the tracking arithmetic of particle filter were improved based on the polar coordinates at the omnidirectional center. The edge of a randomly moving object could be detected by optical flow field and was surrounded by a reference region in the particle filter. A dynamic motion model was established to predict particle state. Histograms were used as the fea-tures in the reference region and candidate regions. The mutual information (MI) and Gaussian function were com-bined to calculate particle weights. Finally, the state of tracked object was computed by the total particle states with weights. Experiment results show that the proposed method could detect and track moving objects with better real-time performance and accuracy.
