The paper reports about the development of a software module that allows autonomous object detection, recognition and tracking in outdoor urban environment. The purpose of the project was to endow a commercial PTZ camera with object tracking and recognition capability to automate some surveillance tasks. The module can discriminate between various moving objects and identify the presence of pedestrians or vehicles, track them, and zoom on them, in near real-time. The paper gives an overview of the module characteristics and its operational uses within the commercial system.