I have been playing with ideas by Johnny Lee who used Wii controller and IR LEDs to track head movement and to create illusion of looking into virtual world through a window.
I want to recreate the same effect using just standard webcam and machine vision techniques.
So far I am using only single LED and simplified method for adjusting the view but the first attempt looks promising:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CSnRo_TjesAt the moment I am only detecting position of 1 LED by applying threshold on the captured intensity image and calculating centre of gravity to get point location.
Later I want to add more LEDs to obtain better head position, add noise filtering and motion filtering (Kalman filter or Particle based filters).
Eventually adding optical filter to the camera (to reduce amount of visible light keeping IR) and using IR LEDs might bring the whole thing closer the Lee's system.
I am also considering face tracking algorithms. I have tied built in OpenCV face tracker but its accuracy was very poor.
