Human following with a mobile robot based on combination of disparity and color images

This paper presents a target tracking system for a mobile robot in both indoor and outdoor environments. A stereo camera, which is robust to sunlight and illumination changes, is used. Human regions in images are detected from 3D information. Using color information, a target region is discriminated from the detected human regions. Hue and saturation are chosen as features robust to illumination changes. Finally, a mobile robot is controlled based on the 3D information of the detected target region. The effectiveness of the proposed system is verified through human following experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments.