Detecting and tracking people using an RGB-D camera via multiple detector fusion

The goal of personal robotics is to create machines that help us with the tasks of daily living, co-habiting with us in our homes and offices. These robots must interact with people on a daily basis, navigating with and around people, and approaching people to serve them. To enable this coexistence, personal robots must be able to detect and track people in their environment. Excellent progress has been made in the vision community in detecting people outdoors, in surveillance scenarios, in Internet images, or in specific scenarios such as video game play in living rooms. The indoor robot perception problem differs, however, in that the platform is moving, the subjects are frequently occluded or truncated by the field-of-view, there is large scale variation, the subjects take on a wider range of poses than pedestrians, and computation must take place in near real time. In this paper, we describe a system for detecting and tracking people from image and depth sensors on board a mobile robot. To cope with the challenges of indoor mobile perception, our system combines an ensemble of detectors in a unified framework, is efficient, and has the potential to incorporate multiple sensor inputs. The performance of our algorithm surpasses other approaches on two challenging data sets, including a new robot-based data set.