Robust Motion Detection and Tracking for Human-Robot Interaction

The paradigm shift of Robotics moving toward autonomous robots meeting human needs in real world settings requires developing robot interaction skills. So, a synergy of different disciplines is essential to achieve that goal. In particular, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), the study of how humans interact with robots in daily environments, aims to endow robots with the necessary interactive abilities. In this context, efficient people detection and tracking is an imperative preliminary step to increase efficiency by selecting relevant parts of an image to be processed by other systems such as: gesture detection and recognition; face detection, recognition and tracking; understanding human activity, etc. We propose to analyze the motion detection problem by providing a solution for a good environment adaptation of the robot system and real-time visual perception, including an accurate people/object distinction.