As an important branch of image processing and computer vision

dynamic target detection and tracking is widely applied in military and civilian applications. A new method of target detection and tracking based on fast computation using sparse optical flow is proposed in this paper. Only optical flow vectors of specific pixels which can reflect features of the image are calculated in this method. Furthermore

an image pyramid is combined to detect and track the faster and the larger-scale motions. In this paper

the new method is compared with methods based on dense optical flow and color feature. The comparison results show that the method proposed in this paper has many advantages

such as high calculation efficiency

well dealing with target occlusion

well detecting and tracking fast targets

and so on. Experiments under various conditions are done to validate the effect of this method. Tracking accuracy can reach more than 80% in most cases and the method can also meet the real-time requirement. This indicates that the method is feasible and practical.