Face Tracking Active Vision System with Saccadic and Smooth Pursuit

摘要

People detection and tracking is very important and fundamental functionality in surveillance and human-robot interaction. This paper presents a robotic vision module with rapid eye movements for fast face tracking. Face tracking is initiated by robust face detection followed with color histogram-based matching and linear prediction of face position. Rapid and smooth eye movements (i.e. panning and tilting) are embodied by linear and hybrid (i.e. velocity-based FF + position based FB) control scheme as well as powerful yet widely used DC motor. Experimental results demonstrated ultra-fast and extremely smooth pursuit of moving face, at 6 deg/40ms (approximately 10m/sec at the distance of 3m), with abrupt change in motion direction (e.g., jumping), with sustained robustness to the change of pose (e.g., from frontal face to nearly back of head).