A low-cost real-time stereo vision system for looking at people

Real-time computer vision systems that observe the actions of people have received increasing attention as they are important for a broad range of applications. Examples are intelligent man-machine interfaces or intelligent rooms that have the capability to understand the actions of their inhabitants. In this paper we present the design of a stereo vision system for the precise and robust real time tracking of human hands and heads that unlike previous systems uses low-cost industry standard components. The system uses color and motion information to find the human. Using previously calibrated cameras the 3D positions of hands and head are calculated. Because of its client-server architecture the system is scalable to an arbitrary number of cameras and application processes. Experimental results for the performance of the system are given