Face Tracking Active Vision System with Saccadic and Smooth Pursuit

- People detection and tracking is very important and fundamental functionality in surveillance and human-robot interaction. This paper presents a robotic vision module with rapid eye movements for fast face tracking. Face tracking is initiated by robust face detection followed with color histogram-based matching and linear prediction of face position. Rapid and smooth eye movements (i.e. panning and tilting) are embodied by linear and hybrid (i.e. velocity-based FF + position based FB) control scheme as well as powerful yet widely used DC motor. Experimental results demonstrated ultra-fast and extremely smooth pursuit of moving face, at 6 deg/40 ms (approximately 10 m/sec at the distance of 3 m), with abrupt change in motion direction (e.g., jumping), with sustained robustness to the change of pose (e.g., from frontal face to nearly back of head).