  Tracking with a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera has been a research topic in
computer vision for many years. However, it is very difficult to assess the
progress that has been made on this topic because there is no standard
evaluation methodology. The difficulty in evaluating PTZ tracking algorithms
arises from their dynamic nature. In contrast to other forms of tracking, PTZ
tracking involves both locating the target in the image and controlling the
motors of the camera to aim it so that the target stays in its field of view.
This type of tracking can only be performed online. In this paper, we propose a
new evaluation framework based on a virtual PTZ camera. With this framework,
tracking scenarios do not change for each experiment and we are able to
replicate online PTZ camera control and behavior including camera positioning
delays, tracker processing delays, and numerical zoom. We tested our evaluation
framework with the Camshift tracker to show its viability and to establish
baseline results.
