Patent 7298867 was granted and assigned to Lockheed Martin on November, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A component association tracker is disclosed. The tracker detects, identifies and tracks a target or targets using components extracted from an image. The tracker extracts the components from a window in the image according to edge directions of connected pixels. The tracker associates the components with existing tracks from a track file. The tracks are updated according to information from the associated components.