With the development of the target identification and tracking system

it is very necessary to realize the automatic capture

identification and tracking of the target. In this paper

a target searching algorithm is proposed. The algorithm takes the advantage of the gray level distributions and it automatically searches for the target inside a given region. We suggest that the searching begins at a given region

which contains the target and there are gray level differences between the target and the surrounding backgronds. Such suggestion is valid and the algorithm can be regarded as an active boundary method. At first

it reduces the searching area gradually and it locates the target with the gray level gradient information of the image

at last the boundary of the target is located. During the searching process

only few control points are computed and the initial positions of the control points are not limited strictly. Therefore it can search quickly. The experiment results are satisfactory for the targets with different size and shapes.