Real-Time Visual Target Tracking in RGB-D Data for Person-Following Robots

This paper describes a novel RGB-D-based visual target tracking method for person-following robots. We enhance a single-object tracker, which combines RGB and depth information, by exploiting two different types of distracters. First set of distracters includes objects existing near-by the target, and the other set is for objects looking similar to the target. The proposed algorithm reduces tracking drifts and wrong target re-identification by exploiting the distracters. Experiments on real-world video sequences demonstrating a person-following problem show a significant improvement over the method without tracking distracters and state-of-the-art RGB-based trackers. A mobile robot following a person is tested in real environment.