Robust Real-Time Vision for a Personal Service Robot in a Home Visual Sensor Network

We address issues dealing with visual perception for a personal service robot in the intelligent home environment. We identify key visual functionalities necessary for the robot to perform its activities. They include people detection and identification, gesture recognition, and self-localization. We propose an efficient and reliable framework to organize and coordinate the vision sensor nodes: fixed cameras mounted on walls, and earnera(s) on the mobile robot. We propose solutions to the different vision tasks, and present our implementation within this framework, validated with experimental results.