Improved personal identification method for guide robots using dress color information via KINECT

In this paper, a Simple Personal Identification (SPI) method using Dress Color Information (DCI) for guide robots is proposed. The DCI is a small number of color information that is only calculated at narrow areas around a user's (guided person's) joint positions obtained via KINECT on a mobile robot. The SPI method includes not only the person's skeletal information but also the DCI. This method can identify the specific user in real time. As a result, even if the mobile robot loses the user temporarily when there are many people present, it can find the user properly and promptly. Our previous research had four problems as follows: 1) there is a position error between skeletal joint positions and pixel positions in RGBA camera image, 2) the narrow areas around joint positions often overflows from the dress areas, 3) changing lighting environments causes wrong results, and 4) the personal conformity is unstable. To cope with these difficulties, an improved calculating method using correction functions and color information of all joint points as a vector different from previous method is proposed in this research. The experimental results show the accuracy of our new method.