Development of an autonomous robot for face tracking

In this paper, we develop a robot which can detect and track a human face for the purpose of developing an autonomous robot that communicates with people. In order to detect a human face from a camera image, we pay attention to flesh color of a person and develop two techniques for detecting and pursuing a flesh-colored area as a face. The developed robot models a human head. We install two USB cameras as the eyes of the robot head. In addition, the robot head can perform pan-tilt movement by two servomotors. In the performed experiment, the face of a person walking around was detected and tracked successfully by the developed robot head.