GMM-based 3D object representation and robust tracking in unconstructed dynamic environments

Operating in unstructured dynamic human environments, it is desirable for a robot to identify dynamic objects and robustly track them without prior knowledge. This paper proposes a novel model-free approach for probabilistic representation and tracking of moving objects from 3D point set data based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). GMM is inherently flexible such that represents any shape of objects as 3D probability distribution of the true positions. In order to achieve the robustness of the model, the proposed tracking method consists of GMM-based 3D registration, Gaussian Sum Filtering, and GMM simplification processes. The tracking performance of the proposed method was evaluated in the moving two human hands with one object, and it performed over 87% tracking accuracy together with processing 5 frames per second.