Attentive Sensing for Long-Range Face Recognition

To be effective, a social robot must reliably detect and recognize people in all visual directions and in both near and far fields. A major challenge is the resolution/field-of-view tradeoff; here we propose and evaluate a novel attentive sensing solution. Panoramic low-resolution pre-attentive sensing is provided by an array of wide-angle cameras, while attentive sensing is achieved with a high-resolution, narrow field-of-view camera and a mirror-based gaze deflection system. Quantitative evaluation on a novel dataset shows that this attentive sensing strategy can yield good panoramic face recognition performance in the wild out to distances of ~35m.