Automatic tracking lighting equipment, lighting controller and tracking apparatus

Automatic tracking lighting equipment comprising:

• lighting means for projecting light in a lighting direction;
• drive means for changing said lighting direction of said lighting means;
• image pickup means provided in a lighting space to pick up an image of a pattern in a lighting space;
• image recognizing means for recognizing a target based upon a presence of said pattern in said image of said image pickup means and for specifying coordinates of said target;
• calculating means for calculating an amount of movement of said lighting direction based upon coordinates of said target specified by said image recognizing means, and a distance between said lighting means and said image pickup means in said lighting space;
• and
• control means for driving said drive means based on a result of said calculating means.

Automatic tracking lighting equipment comprising:

• lighting means for projecting light in a lighting direction;
• first drive means for changing said lighting direction of said lighting means;
• image pickup means provided in a lighting space for picking up an image in said lighting space;
• second drive means for changing an image pickup direction of said image pickup means;
• storage means for storing the image pickup direction of said image pickup means;
• image recognizing means for recognizing a target based upon an image picked up by said image pickup means and for specifying coordinates of said target;
• second calculating means for calculating an amount of movement of said second drive means based on a distance of said target recognized by said image recognizing means;
• first calculating means for calculating an amount of movement of the lighting direction of said lighting means based upon an output of said second calculating means, a positional relation between said image pickup means and said lighting means, and an image pickup direction of said image pickup means stored in said storage means;
• first control means for controlling said first drive means based on an output of said first calculating means;
• and
• second control means for controlling said second drive means based on an output of said second calculating means.

A lighting controller for a system including a lighting fixture for radiating light from a light source;

• a drive section for pivoting the lighting fixture about an axis;
• image pickup means pivotable about an axis, for picking up an image in an image pickup region and outputting an image;
• a display device which displays the image;
• an input device for designating a point on the image as displayed on the display device, the lighting controller comprising a pivoting quantity calculating section which calculates a quantity of pivoting of the lighting fixture for illuminating the designated point based upon a relative distance between the point on the display image designated by the input device and the position of origin of the display image, whereby the drive section pivots the lighting fixture based on the quantity of pivoting.

A tracking apparatus comprising:

• image pickup means for picking up an image in a specified area;
• marker detecting means for detecting a marker attached to an object to be tracked based on a first video signal from said image pickup means;
• tracking object setting means for setting a tracking object region including the object to be tracked in a second video signal from said image pickup means;
• characteristic value storage means for storing a characteristic value of the tracking object region set by said tracking object setting means;
• object extracting means for calculating a degree of respect to the characteristic value of the object to be tracked stored in said characteristic value storage means from the second video signal from said image pickup means and obtaining a position of the object to be tracked based on a result of calculation;
• and
• position detecting means for detecting the position of the object to be tracked in the video signal input successively by using at least one of said market detecting means and said object extracting means.