Abstract-Based on the study of developments in many fields of computer vision, a novel computer vision navigation system for mobile tracking robot is presented. According to the primary functions of this kind of robot, three irrelevant technologies, pattern recognition, binocular vision and motion estimation, make up of the basic technologies of our robot. The non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm is applied to detect the target. The application method of NMF in our robot is demonstrated. Interesting observations on distance measurement and motion capture are discussed in detail. The reasons resulting in error of distance measurement are analyzed. According to the models and formulas of distance measurement error, the error type could be found, which is helpful to decrease the distance error. Based on the diamond search (DS) technology applied in MPEG-4, an improved DS algorithm is developed to meet the special requirement of mobile tracking robot.