Person-following for Telepresence Robots Using Web Cameras

Many existing mobile robotic telepresence systems have equipped with two web cameras, one is a forward-facing camera (FF camera) for video communication, and the other is a downward-facing camera (DF camera) for robot navigation. In this paper, we present a new framework of autonomous person-following for telepresence robots using the two web cameras. Based on correlation filters tracking methods, we use the FF camera to track the upper body of a person and the DF camera to localize and track the person's feet. We improve the robustness of feet trackers, consisting of a left foot tracker and a right foot tracker, by making full use of the spatial constraints of the human body parts. We conducted experiments on tracking in different environmental situations and real person-following scenario to evaluate the effectiveness of our method.