Robust Tracking of People by a Mobile Robotic Agent

We present methods for tracking people in dynamic and changing environments from camera mounted on a mobile robot. We describe processes to extract color, motion, and depth information from video and we present methods to merge these processes to allow for reliable tracking of people. We discuss how this merging of different measurements can aid in instances where there is motion in the scene due to large movements by people, camera movements, lighting variations, even in the presence of skin-like colors in the scene. We also apply the results from our tracking system for gesture recognition in the context of humanrobot interaction. Keywords: People tracking, Gesture Recognition, Vision-based user interfaces, Robot vision. 1 Introduction One of the goals of building intelligent and interactive machines is to make them aware of the user's presence. In this paper we present various computer vision methodologies for building a system capable of determining the presence of humans in a sce..