Accelerating Real-time Face Detection on a Raspberry Pi Telepresence Robot

Effective face detection in real-time is an essential procedure for achieving autonomous motion in telepresence robots. Since the procedure demand high computation power, using it to create autonomous motion in low-cost robots is a challenge. This paper addresses this issue and making three contributions. First, the process to enabling the real-time face detection on Raspberry Pi's graphical processor is presented. Second, the development of an autonomous pan-tilt telepresence robot to follow an interlocutor face using two Raspberry Pi-1 model B is demonstrated. Third, the evaluation on resource requirements when operating the robot in various scenarios is described. The face detection module ran in average at 16.7 Quarter VGA frames per second, while mediating real-time video conversation remotely between two parties. The results confirmed that vision-based autonomous motion can be added to a low-cost telepresence robots with acceptable performance. Thus, making secure telecommunication via robots is viable with less budget constraint.