A Multi Modal People Tracker for Real Time Human Robot Interaction

Tracking people in the surroundings of interactive service robots is a topic of high interest. Even if image based detectors using deep learning techniques have improved the detection rate and accuracy a lot, for robotic applications it is necessary to integrate those detections over time and over the limited ranges of individual sensors into a global model. That data fusion enables a continuous state estimation of people and helps reducing the false decisions taken by individual detectors and increasing the overall range. In this paper, we present a tracking framework with a new distance measure for data association and a proper consideration of individual sensors' accuracies. By means of that, we could deal with high false detection rates of laser-based leg detectors without introducing further heuristics like a background model. The proposed system is compared to other tracking approaches from the state of the art. Furthermore, we present a novel manually annotated benchmark dataset for multi sensor person tracking from a moving robot platform in a guide scenario, which will be made publicly available.