Abstract: In this paper,a visual surveillance system for open country is introduced,which is composed of motion target detection,tracking and panorama generation. A camera is mounted on a 360° controllable platform for a vehicle with its video signal and orientation data transferred to the computer at remote base via wireless communication channels. The computer automatically detects motion targets,and generates panorama with motion target mosaics in realtime. When a target is selected by an user,the computer will control the camera platform to track it. The affine motion model and robust parameter estimation method are used to analyse principal inter-frame motion which will be used for motion compensation before calculating difference picture to locate motion target via clustering. Then target is tracked robustly based on motion smoothness constraint. Programs are optimized which can run on a PC for 384×288 size of processed image with a speed of 12.5 Hz.