Robust Real-Time Human Perception with Depth Camera

Perception of the presence and position of human is crucial for many kinds of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. In this paper, we have developed a novel two-staged method for real-time human detection in depth image. The first stage is to quickly scan through the image to detect possible head-top locations in order to ensure all the candidate locations are included. The second stage is to use a novel head-shoulder descriptor (HSD) which jointly encodes the One-hot Depth Difference information and local geometric characteristics of human upper body to filter the detections so as to keep the genuine human locations and discard false positives. The results show that our approach using only depth data is superior to other methods using color and depth images on four datasets. In addition, our method performs well under weak illumination conditions or even total darkness. Moreover, our system is also able to run in real-time on conventional PC without GPU acceleration.