While this technology is probably still a number of years from appearing in everyday consumer devices, a computer technology student at the University of Surrey, Zdenek Kalal, recently unveiled one of the most advanced visual tracking systems seen outside of a DARPA facility.

His project, entitled 'Predator' is a smart camera system that learns from experience. The system is capable of tracking both objects and faces, and can actually learn to recognise and differentiate between different objects.

One of the system's most useful appliances is in helping paralyzed people interact with a computer, for example, you can hold a pen in your mouth and use that to act as a computer mouse.

The Predator system learns from mistakes to improve performance over time, with its end result “resembling the performance of human vision.”

“I really like to work on problems that may have impact very soon and to provide simple solutions that can be applied in various areas,” said Zdenek during a recent presentation in London where he was awarded with the 'Technology Everywhere' award for his work on the smart camera system.

Dr. Krystian Mikolajczyk, Zdenek's PhD supervisor said, “This research has an enormous application potential. We all know the success of Kinect from Microsoft, which relies on a very similar technology. It can also be used in other areas such as human computer interactions, augmented reality, video post-production, motion capture, visual surveillance, robot navigation and assisted driving.”

To see first-hand how this amazingly innovative technology performs, check out the video below where Zdenek himself demonstrates how the Predator system works. We for one can't wait until this kind of technology goes mainstream.