Human recognition for following robots with a Kinect sensor

In this paper, a human recognition method based on soft biometrics is proposed for the human following robot. Two soft biometric traits (clothes color and body size) are calculated as features of the human. First, the human region detected by the Kinect is segmented to obtain the torso and leg parts of the body. Then the weighted HSV histograms of the body parts are calculated to describe the clothes color information. Body height, arm length and shoulder width values are measured to represent the body size information. Finally, human recognition is implemented by evaluating the similarity among the objects. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method is verified by the experiments. And the robot system with the recognition method can recognize and follow a human target reliably.