Tracking identities and attention in smart environments - contributions and progress in the CHIL project

To provide intelligent services in a smart environments it is necessary to acquire information about the room, the people in it and their interactions. This includes, for example, the number of people, their identities, locations, postures, body and head orientations, among others. This paper gives an overview of the perceptual technology evaluations that were conducted in the CHIL project, specifically those held in the CLEAR 2006 and 2007 evaluation workshops. We then summarize the main achievements and lessons learnt in the project in the areas of person tracking, person identification and head pose estimation, all of which are critical perception components in order to build perceptive smart environments.