Fusing multiple image transformations and a thermal sensor with kinect to improve person detection ability

This paper proposes a novel approach to combine data from multiple low-cost sensors to detect people in a mobile robot. Robust detection of people is a key capability required for robots working in environments with people. Several works have shown the benefits of fusing data from complementary sensors. The Kinect sensor provides a rich data set at a significantly low cost, however, it has some limitations for its use on a mobile platform, mainly that people detection algorithms rely on images captured by a static camera. To cope with these limitations, this work is based on the fusion of Kinect and a thermical sensor (thermopile) mounted on top of a mobile platform. We propose the implementation of an evolutionary selection of sequences of image transformation to detect people through supervised classifiers. Experimental results carried out with a mobile platform in a manufacturing shop floor show that the percentage of wrong classified using only Kinect is drastically reduced with the classification algorithms and with the combination of the three information sources. Extra experiments are presented as well to show the benefits of the image transformation sequence idea here presented. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.