Robotics: Science and Systems IX

Multi-Hypothesis Social Grouping and Tracking for Mobile Robots

Matthias Luber, Kai Arras

Abstract:

Detecting and tracking people and groups of people is a key skill for robots in populated environments. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting and learning socio-spatial relations between individuals and to track their group formations. Opposed to related work, we track and reason about multiple social grouping hypotheses in a recursive way, assume a mobile sensor that perceives the scene from a first-person perspective, and achieve good tracking performance in real-time using only 2D range data. The method, that relies on an extended multi-hypothesis tracking approach, also improves person-level tracking in two ways: the social grouping information is fed back to predict human motion over learned intra-group constraints and to support data association by adapting track-specific occlusion probabilities. Both measures lead to an improved occlusion handling and a better trade-off between false negative and false positive tracks. In experiments with a mobile robot and on large-scale outdoor data sets, we demonstrate how the approach is able to model social grouping and to improve person tracking by a significant reduction of track identifier switches and false negative tracks.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Luber-RSS-13, 
    AUTHOR    = {Matthias Luber AND Kai Arras}, 
    TITLE     = {Multi-Hypothesis Social Grouping and Tracking for Mobile Robots}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2013}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Berlin, Germany}, 
    MONTH     = {June},
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2013.IX.001} 
}