Abstract
In this paper, we present a robust 3D human-head tracking method. 3D head positions are essential for robots interacting with people. Natural interaction behaviors such as making eye contacts require head positions. Past researches with laser range finder (LRF) have been successful in tracking 2D human position with high accuracy in real time. However, LRF trackers cannot track multiple 3D head positions. On the other hand, trackers with multi-viewpoint images can obtain 3D head position. However, vision-based trackers generally lack robustness and scalability, especially in open environments where lightening conditions vary by time. To achieve 3D robust real-time tracking, here we propose a new method that combines LRF tracker and multi-camera tracker. We combine the results from trackers using the LRF results as maintenance information toward multi-camera tracker. Through an experiment in a real environment, we show that our method outperforms toward existing methods, both in its robustness and scalability.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Glas DF, Miyashita T, Ishiguro Hiroshi, Hagita Norihiro (2007) Laser tracking of human body motion using adaptive shape modeling. Int Conf Intell Robots Syst (IROS) 22(1): 111–116
Cui J, Zha H, Zhao H, Shibasaki R (2007) Laser-based detection and tracking of multiple people in crowds. Comput Vis Image Underst (CVIU) 106(2–3): 300–312
Brooks A, Williams S (2003) Tracking people with networks of heterogeneous sensors. In: Australasian conference on robotics and automation (ACRA), pp 1–7
Hähnel D, Burgard W, Fox D, Fishkin K, Philipose M (2004) Mapping and localization with RFID technology. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA)
Hamasaki K, Nakajima T, Okatani T, Deguchi K (2003) Tracking multiple three-dimensional motions by using modified condensation algorithm and multiple images. In: International conference on intelligent robots and systems. Las Vegas, Nevada, October 2003, pp 236–241
Suzuki T, Iwasaki S, Kobayashi Y, Sato K, Sugimoto A (2007) Incorporating environmental models for improving vision-based tracking of people. Syst Comput Jpn 38(2): 1592–1600
Matsumoto Y, Kato T, Wada T (2007) An occlusion robust likelihood integration method for multi-camera people head tracking. In: Proceedings of international conference on networked sensing systems (INSS), pp 235–242
Kyungnam K, Larry D (2006) Multi-camera tracking and segmentation of occluded people on ground plane using search-guided particle filtering. ECCV 2006, pp 98–109
Fleuret F, Berclaz J, Lengagne R, Fua P (2008) Multicamera people tracking with a probabilistic occupancy map. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 30(2): 267–282
Cui J, Zha H, Zhao H, Shibasaki R (2005) Tracking multiple people using laser and vision. Intelligent Robots and Systems 2005 (IROS 2005), August 2005, pp 2116—2121
Isard M, Blake A (1998) Condensation—conditional density propagation for visual tracking. Int J Comput Vis 29(1): 5–28
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Matsumoto, Y., Wada, T., Nishio, S. et al. Scalable and robust multi-people head tracking by combining distributed multiple sensors. Intel Serv Robotics 3, 29–36 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-009-0056-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-009-0056-5