Pedestrian Detection

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello everybody,
I'm new to the community and have pretty much no experience in this field at all. I have an idea that I want to make reality, and wanted to ask you guys if it would be possible to make this with an Arduino.

Here's the idea:
I want to use a fixed webcam (or other camera) to detect pedestrians, then calculate the center point of them, and then directing some servos to that center point. That's it.

What I have:
I found some tutorials on face tracking via pan/titlt servos and OpenCV/Processing. For example: Face Tracking with a Pan/Tilt Servo Bracket - SparkFun Electronics
I also found some open source projects on people/pedestrian tracking, like for example: https://bitbucket.org/rodrigob/doppia

The problem:
I have no idea if it is possible to combine, and if it is, I have no idea how to do that. I basically havent figured out where to start and what to do.
Can anyone help me there?

Question 2)
Would it be possible to make all of that without using an external computer or laptop where to which the arduino needs to be connected at all times, but simply using something like pcduino or anything like that?

Thanks for the help!

2

It's all feasible as long as you do the image processing on a PC, and it seems quite a few people have used OpenCV to solve that type of problem. There are some very small PCs available, such as an RPi, which should have enough power to do this sort of thing. An Arduino would be a sensible way to interface between the PC and the servos.

The idea of an automatic sentry gun has been around for some time and various people have got them working very well - a laptop seems to be a common platform for the image processing part of the problem but I would have thought that very little of the solution would be platform-specific and you might well be able to find an open source solution that could be ported to whatever PC you wanted if you search for terms like turret, sentry.