• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.152-159
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• 2010

Finding a head of a person in a scene is very important for taking a well composed picture by a robot photographer because it depends on the position of the head. So in this paper, we propose a robust head tracking algorithm using a hybrid of an omega shape tracker and local binary pattern (LBP) AdaBoost face detector for the robot photographer to take a fine picture automatically. Face detection algorithms have good performance in terms of finding frontal faces, but it is not the same for rotated faces. In addition, when the face is occluded by a hat or hands, it has a hard time finding the face. In order to solve this problem, the omega shape tracker based on active shape model (ASM) is presented. The omega shape tracker is robust to occlusion and illuminationchange. However, whenthe environment is dynamic,such as when people move fast and when there is a complex background, its performance is unsatisfactory. Therefore, a method combining the face detection algorithm and the omega shape tracker by probabilistic method using histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptor is proposed in this paper, in order to robustly find human head. A robot photographer was also implemented to abide by the 'rule of thirds' and to take photos when people smile.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.257-264
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• 2009

This paper proposes a novel face detection method that finds tiny faces located at a long range even with low-resolution input images captured by a mobile robot. The proposed approach can locate extremely small-sized face regions of $12{\times}12$ pixels. We solve a tiny face detection problem by organizing a system that consists of multiple detectors including a mean-shift color tracker, short- and long-rage face detectors, and an omega shape detector. The proposed method adopts the long-range face detector that is well trained enough to detect tiny faces at a long range, and limiting its operation to only within a search region that is automatically determined by the mean-shift color tracker and the omega shape detector. By focusing on limiting the face search region as much as possible, the proposed method can accurately detect tiny faces at a long distance even with a low-resolution image, and decrease false positives sharply. According to the experimental results on realistic databases, the performance of the proposed approach is at a sufficiently practical level for various robot applications such as face recognition of non-cooperative users, human-following, and gesture recognition for long-range interaction.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.2C
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• pp.141-149
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• 2007

Associating the shoulder line with head location of the human body is useful in verifying, localizing and tracking persons in an image. Since the head line and the shoulder line, what we call ${\Omega}$-shape, move together in a consistent way within a limited range of deformation, we can build a statistical shape model using Active Shape Model (ASM). However, when the conventional ASM is applied to ${\Omega}$-shape fitting, it is very sensitive to background edges and clutter because it relies only on the local edge or gradient. Even though appearance is a good alternative feature for matching the target object to image, it is difficult to learn the appearance of the ${\Omega}$-shape because of the significant difference between people's skin, hair and clothes, and because appearance does not remain the same throughout the entire video. Therefore, instead of teaming appearance or updating appearance as it changes, we model the discriminative appearance where each pixel is classified into head, torso and background classes, and update the classifier to obtain the appropriate discriminative appearance in the current frame. Accordingly, we make use of two features in fitting ${\Omega}$-shape, edge gradient which is used for localization, and discriminative appearance which contributes to stability of the tracker. The simulation results show that the proposed method is very robust to pose change, occlusion, and illumination change in tracking the head and shoulder line of people. Another advantage is that the proposed method operates in real time.