FFT-based Human Detection using 1-D Laser Range Data

In general, a socially-aware mobile robot must have an ability to safely navigate among human environment. To address with this competency, the mobile robots must be able to detect the existence of humans around. This paper proposes the use of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to analyze shape-models of human legs that is obtained from Laser Range Finder (LRF) scanning results. A 240° of LRF was used to capture and visualize the environment in one dimensional plane. The plane is then converted into one dimensional signal that consists of 1,024 data points. These data points represented the distance of all measured points. A specific set of points formed the pattern of human legs only is then resized into 32 data. This resized-data is transformed into frequency by using FFT. The result of FFT is then fed into Support Vector Machine (SVM) to be classified into two classes, they are human or not human. Based on the experimental results, our proposed method shows a promising result in order to detect human based on one dimensional feature of his legs by achieving more than 80% of accuracy.