Multimodal biometric identification system for mobile robots combining human metrology to face recognition and speaker identification

Recognizing a person from a distance is important to establish meaningful social interaction and to provide additional cues regarding the situations experienced by a robot. To do so, face recognition and speaker identification are biometrics commonly used, with identification performance that are influenced by the distance between the person and the robot. This paper presents a system that combines these biometrics with human metrology (HM) to increase identification performance and range. HM measures are derived from 2D silhouettes extracted online using a dynamic background subtraction approach, processing in parallel 45 front features and 24 side features in 400 ms compared to 38 front and 22 side features extracted in sequence in 30 sec by using the approach presented by Lin and Wang [1]. By having each modality identify a set of up to five possible candidates, results suggest that combining modalities provide better performance compared to what each individual modality provides, from a wider range of distances.