Tracking System for a Coal Mine Drilling Robot for Low-Illumination Environments

In recent years, discriminative correlation filters (DCF) based trackers have been widely used in mobile robots due to their efficiency. However, underground coal mines are typically a low illumination environment, and tracking in this environment is a challenging problem that has not been adequately addressed in the literature. Thus, this paper proposes a Low-illumination Long-term Correlation Tracker (LLCT) and designs a visual tracking system for coal mine drilling robots. A low-illumination tracking framework combining image enhancement strategies and long-time tracking is proposed. A long-term memory correlation filter tracker with an interval update strategy is utilized. In addition, a local area illumination detection method is proposed to prevent the failure of the enhancement algorithm due to local over-exposure. A convenient image enhancement method is proposed to boost efficiency. Extensive experiments on popular object tracking benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed tracker significantly outperforms the baseline trackers, achieving high real-time performance. The tracker's performance is verified on an underground drilling robot in a coal mine. The results of the field experiment demonstrate that the performance of the novel tracking framework is better than that of state-of-the-art trackers in low-illumination environments.