Mirrobot: Fast Detection of Body-Parts in the Scale-Space of Range Images with an Application to Human Motion Copying

In this paper we present a novel approach to fast detection of human body-parts that relates the idea of scale-space to range images. The resulting method is a pre-detector that extracts end-points at different scales that may correspond to the human´s head or hands. The method is aimed to initialize more sophisticated human kinematics estimators and can be enhanced with known face or hand detectors based on color or grey-level imaging sensors. We apply our approach to the human motion copying problem (mimicking) and report on a set-up shown on two fairs in Germany in 2006. In the set-up an android robot is used to mimic observed human upper torso movements. We conclude by discussing results and point to further work