Abstract
In this paper a robust system for enabling robots to detect and identify humans in domestic environments is proposed. Robust human detection is achieved through the use of thermal and visual information sources that are integrated to detect human-candidate objects, which are further processed in order to verify the presence of humans and their identity using face information in the thermal and visual spectrums. Face detection is used to verify the presence of humans, and face recognition to identify them. Active vision mechanisms are employed in order to improve the relative pose of a candidate object/person in case direct identification is not possible. The response of the different modules is characterized, and the proposed system is validated using image databases of real domestic environments, and human detection and identification benchmarks of the RoboCup@Home research community.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Sinha, P., Balas, B., Ostrovsky, Y., Russell, R.: Face recognition by humans: 19 results all computer vision researchers should know about. Proc. of the IEEE. 94(11), 1948–1962 (2006)
Hermosilla, G., Loncomilla, P., Ruiz-del-Solar, J.: Thermal face recognition using local interest points and descriptors for HRI applications. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. (RoboCup Symposium 2010) (2010, in press)
Hermosilla, G., Ruiz-del-Solar, J., Verschae, R., Correa, M.: Face recognition using thermal infrared images for human-robot interaction applications: a comparative study. In: 6th IEEE Latin American Robotics Symposium – LARS 2009, Valparaíso, Chile (CD Proceedings), 29–30 Oct. 2009
Ruiz-del-Solar, J., Verschae, R., Correa, M.: Recognition of faces in unconstrained environments: a comparative study. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing (Recent Advances in Biometric Systems: A Signal Processing Perspective), vol. 2009, Article ID 184617, p. 19 (2009)
Kong, S., Heo, J., Abidi, B., Paik, J., Abidi, M.: Recent advances in visual and infrared face recognition - a review. J. Comput. Vis. Image Understanding 97(1), 103–135 (2005)
Meis, U., Oberlander, M., Ritter, W.: Reinforcing the reliability of pedestrian detection in far-infrared sensing. 2004 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, pp. 779–783, 14–17 June 2004
Binelli, E., Broggi, A., Fascioli, A., Ghidoni, S., Grisleri, P., Graf, T., Meinecke, M.: A modular tracking system for far infrared pedestrian recognition. 2005 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, pp. 759–764, 6–8 June 2005
Mudaly, S.S.: Novel computer-based infrared pedestrian data-acquisition system. Electron. Lett. 15(13), 371–372 (1979)
Nanda, H., Davis, L.: Probabilistic template based pedestrian detection in infrared videos. IEEE Intell. Veh. Symposium 1, 15–20 (2002)
Bertozzi, M., Broggi, A., Fascioli, A., Graf, T., Meinecke, M.-M.: Pedestrian detection for driver assistance using multiresolution infrared vision. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 53(6), 1666–1678 (2004)
Wu, S.-Q, Song, W., Jiang, L.-J., Xie, S.-L., Pan, F., Yau, W.-Y., Ranganath, S.: Infrared face recognition by using blood perfusion data. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 3546, 527–531 (2005)
Wilder, J., Phillips, P.J., Jiang, C., Wiener, S.: Comparison of visible and infra-red imagery for face recognition. In: Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, pp.182–187, 14–16 Oct 1996
Li, S., Chu, R., Liao, Sh., Zhang, L.: Illumination invariant face recognition using near-infrared images. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 29(4), 627–639 (2007)
Li, S., Chu, R., Ao, M., Zhang, L., He, R.: Highly accurate and fast face recognition using near infrared images. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 3832, 151–158 (2005)
Verschae, R., Ruiz-del-Solar, J., Correa, M.: A unified learning framework for object detection and classification using nested cascades of boosted classifiers. Mach. Vis. Appl. 19(2), 85–103 (2008)
Correa, M., Ruiz-del-Solar, J., Bernuy, F.: Face recognition for human-robot interaction applications: a comparative study. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci.,(RoboCup Symposium 2008) 5399, 473–484 (2009)
Zhao, W., Chellappa, R., Rosenfeld, A., Phillips, P.J.: Face recognition: a literature survey. ACM Comput. Surv. 35(4), 399–458 (2003)
Tan, X., Chen, S., Zhou, Z.-H., Zhang, F.: Face recognition from a single image per person: a survey. Pattern Recogn. 39, 1725–1745 (2006)
Chellappa, R., Wilson, C.L., Sirohey, S.: Human and machine recognition of faces: a survey. Proc. IEEE 83(5), 705–740 (1995)
Face Recognition Homepage. Available in January 2008. http://www.face-rec.org/
Turk, M., Pentland, A.: Eigenfaces for recognition. J. Cognitive Neurosicence 3(1), 71–86 (1991)
Mendez, H., San Martin, C., Kittler, J., Plasencia, Y., Garcia, E.: Face recognition with LWIR imagery using local binary patterns. In: Proceedings ICB2009 (2009)
Ruiz-del-Solar, J., Verschae, R.: Robust skin segmentation using neighborhood information. In: The Eleventh International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2004), 24–27 October 2004, pp. 207–210. IEEE Press, Singapore (2004)
Viola, P., Jones, M.: Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. Proc. Conf. Comput. Vis. Patt. Recogn. 1, 511–518 (2001)
Jones, M., Rehg, J.M.: Statistical color models with application to skin detection. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 46(1), 81–96 (2002)
Hjelmas, E., Kee Low, B.: Face detection: a survey. Comput. Vis. Image Understanding, 83(3), 236–274 (2001)
Satake, J., Miura, J.: Robust Stereo-based Person Detecting and Tracking for a Person Following Robot. In: Proc. ICRA 2009 workshop on person detection and tracking. Kobe, Japan (2009)
Wilhelm, T., Böhme, H.-J., Gross, H.-M.: A multi-modal system for tracking and analyzing faces on a mobile robot. Robot. Auton. Syst. 48(1), 31–40, (2004), European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR ’03)
Medionia, G., R.J. Françoisa A., Siddiquia, M., Kima, K., Yoonb, H.: Robust real-time vision for a personal service robot. Comput. Vis. Image Understanding 108(1–2), 196–203, Special Issue on Vision for Human-Computer Interaction, October–November 2007
Li, L., Koh, Y.T., Ge, S.S., Huang, W.: Stereo-based human detection for mobile service robots. Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision Conference, 2004, ICARCV, vol. 1, pp. 74–79 (2004)
Bellotto, N., Hu, H.: Multisensor-based human detection and tracking for mobile service robots systems, man, and cybernetics, Part B: cybernetics. IEEE Trans. 39(1), 167–181 (2009)
Böhme, H.J., Wilhelma, T., Keya, J., Schauera, C., Schrötera, C., Großa, H-M., Hempelb, T.: An approach to multi-modal human–machine interaction for intelligent service robots. Robot. Auton. Syst. 44(1), 83–96 (2003)
Ahonen, T., Hadid, A., Pietikainen, M.: Face description with local binary patterns: application to face recognition. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 28(12), 2037–2041 (2006)
Wisspeintner, T., van der Zant, T., Iocchi, L., Schiffer, S.: RoboCup Home: scientific competition and benchmarking for domestic service robots. Interaction Studies 10(3), 392–426(35) (2009)
iRobot Official Website. Available on Dec. 2010. http://store.irobot.com/home/index.jsp
RoboCup Home Official Website. Available on Dec. 2010. http://www.ai.rug.nl/robocupathome/
FLIR TAU 320 thermal camera. Information available on Dec. 2010. http://www.flir.com/cvs/cores/uncooled/products/tau/
PMD Technologies website: http://www.pmdtec.com/. Accessed Dec 2010
Carmen Robot Navigation Toolkit website: http://carmen.sourceforge.net/. Accessed Dec 2010
Ruiz-del-Solar, J., Correa, M., Lee-Ferng, J., Hevia-Koch, P., Parra, I., Mascaró, M.: UChile HomeBreakers 2010 Team Description Paper. RoboCup Symposium 2010, 19-25 June 2010. Singapore (CD Proceedings)
Munder, S., Gavrila, D.M.: An experimental study on pedestrian classification. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 28, 1863–1868 (2006)
Gavrila, D.M., Munder, S.: Multi-cue pedestrian detection and tracking from a moving vehicle. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 73, 41–59 (2007)
Enzweiler, M., Gavrila, D.M.: Monocular pedestrian detection: survey and experiments. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., IEEE Trans. 31(12), 2179–2195 (2009)
Felzenszwalb, P.F., Girshick, R.B., Mcallester, D.: Cascade object detection with deformable part models. In: Proc. of IEEE Int’l Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2010)
Dalal, N., Triggs, B.: Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection. In: CVPR, vol. 1, pp. 886–893 (2005)
Viola, P.A., Jones, M.J., Snow, D.: Detecting pedestrians using patterns of motion and appearance. IJCV, 63(2), 153–161 (2005)
Tuzel, O., Porikli, F., Meer, P.: Pedestrian detection via classification on riemannian manifolds. IEEE T-PAMI, 30(10), 1713–1727 (2008)
Paisitkriangkrai, S., Shen, C., Zhang, J.: Fast pedestrian detection using a cascade of boosted covariance features. Circuits Syst. Video Technol., IEEE Trans. 18(8), 1140–1151 (2008)
Zhu, Q., Yeh, M.-C., Cheng, K.-T., Avidan, S.: Fast human detection using a cascade of histograms of oriented gradients. In: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE Computer Society Conference, vol. 2, pp. 1491–1498 (2006)
Wojek, C., Schiele, B.: A performance evaluation of single and multi-feature people detection. In: DAGM Symp. on Patt Rec, pp. 82–91 (2008)
Tao, J., Odobez, J.-M.: Fast human detection from videos using covariance features. In: Workshop on VS at ECCV (2008)
Dalal, N., Triggs, B., Schmid C.: Human detection using oriented histograms of flow and appearance. In: ECCV (2), pp. 428–441 (2006)
Dollar, P., Wojek, C., Schiele, B., Perona, P.: Pedestrian detection: a benchmark. In: CVPR, pp. 304–311 (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Correa, M., Hermosilla, G., Verschae, R. et al. Human Detection and Identification by Robots Using Thermal and Visual Information in Domestic Environments. J Intell Robot Syst 66, 223–243 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-011-9612-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-011-9612-2