People Detection by a Mobile Robot Using Stereo Vision in Dynamic Indoor Environments

People detection and tracking is a key issue for social robot design and effective human robot interaction. This paper addresses the problem of detecting people with a mobile robot using a stereo camera. People detection using mobile robots is a difficult task because in real world scenarios it is common to find: unpredictable motion of people, dynamic environments, and different degrees of human body occlusion. Additionally, we cannot expect people to cooperate with the robot to perform its task. In our people detection method, first, an object segmentation method that uses the distance information provided by the a stereo camera is used to separate people from the background. The segmentation method proposed in this work takes into account human body proportions to segment people and provides a first estimation of people location. After segmentation, an adaptive contour people model based on people distance to the robot is used to calculate a probability of detecting people. Fin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: MICAI
• Authors: José Alberto Méndez-Polanco, Angélica Muñoz-Meléndez, Eduardo F. Morales
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2009, Mobile Robot, People Detection, Robot