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Pose Invariant People Detection in Point Clouds for Mobile Robots

Akif Hacinecipoglu, Erhan ilhan Konukseven and Ahmet Bugra Koku
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

Abstract—To be able to navigate in socially complaint fashion and safely, people detection is a very important ability for robots deployed in our social environments. However, it is a challenging task since humans exhibit various poses in daily life as they bend, sit down, touch or interact with each other. A robust people detector should detect humans also in these arbitrary poses. In addition, mobile robots should be able to carry out detection in a real-time manner because our environment is highly dynamic. In this study we developed a fast head and people detector which can, pose invariantly, detect people. Method depends only on depth information of point clouds taken from RGB-D sensors. As a result, it is robust against sudden light and contrast changes. The algorithm runs relying only on CPU, which makes it applicable to mobile robots with low computational resources. 

Index Terms— head detection, robot vision, point clouds

Cite: Akif Hacinecipoglu, Erhan ilhan Konukseven and Ahmet Bugra Koku, "Pose Invariant People Detection in Point Clouds for Mobile Robots," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 709-715, May 2020. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.9.5.709-715

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.