Multi-user identification and efficient user approaching by fusing robot and ambient sensors

We describe a novel framework that combines an overhead camera and a robot RGB-D sensor for real-time people finding. Finding people is one of the most fundamental tasks in robot home care scenarios and it consists of many components, e.g. people detection, people tracking, face recognition, robot navigation. Researchers have extensively worked on these components, but as isolated tasks. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid on bridging these components as an entire system. In this paper, we integrate the separated modules seamlessly, and evaluate the entire system in a robot-care scenario. The results show largely improved efficiency when the robot system is aided by the localization system of the overhead cameras.