Color-based tracking is prone to failure in situations where visually similar targets are moving in close proximity to each other. To deal with the ambiguities in color information we propose an additional color-independent feature based on the target’s local motion, which is calculated from the optical flow induced by the target in consecutive images. By modifying a color-based particle filter...

The success of a social robot relies on its interactions with humans. To enhance human-robot interaction I looked toward useful forms of communication in human-human interaction. Humans communicate through verbal and non-verbal cues, in particular, my study focuses on eye gaze and the effects of its application on human-robot interaction. Specifically, I wanted to know whether having a robot ex...

We present a new approach to imitation learning of grasping skills in the context of a hu-man instructor who demonstrates a grasping action/skill to a mobile service robot equippedwith a 6-degrees-of-freedom arm, a dextrous hand, a multi-view active vision setup andmultimodal sensors. The proposed approach can be divided into 4 steps. The first step usesobject detection mechanis...

A trajectory-based point tracker using chaos evolutionary programming (CEP) algorithm is proposed in this thesis. While motion constraints such as rigidity and small motion which are imposed by previous approaches are liberated, the proposed CEP is proved to be effective for establishing point correspondence between two consecutive frames sampled at a fixed interval. The whole point trajectory ...

For single-target tracking problem Kernel-based method has been proved to be effective. A tracker which takes advantage of contextual information to incorporate general constraints on the shape and motion of objects will usually perform better when compare to the one that does not exploit this information. This is due to the reason that a tracker designed to give the best average performance in...

Visual tracking is prone to distractions, where features similar to the target features guide the tracker away from its intended object. Global shape models and dynamic models are necessary for completely distraction-free contour tracking, but there are many cases when component feature trackers alone can be expected to avoid distraction. We deene the tracking problem in general and devise a me...

Visual tracking is prone to distractions, where features similar to the target features guide the tracker away from its intended object. Global shape models and dynamic models are necessary for completely distraction-free contour tracking, but there are cases when component feature trackers alone can be expected to avoid distraction. We deene the tracking problem in general and devise a method ...

This paper discusses the problem of gaze tracking and its applications to multimodal human-computer interaction. The function of a gaze tracking system can be either passive or active. For example, a system can identify user's message target by monitoring the user's gaze, or the user could use his gaze to directly control an application or launch actions. We have developed a real-time gaze trac...

Human-robot interaction is a hot topic nowadays in the social robotics community. One crucial aspect is represented by the affective communication which comes encoded through the facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for facial expression recognition, which exploits an efficient and adaptive graph-based label propagation (semi-supervised mode) in a multi-observation fra...

This paper examines the problem of cooperative localization for the case of large groups of mobile robots. A Kalman filter estimator is implemented and tested for this purpose. The focus of this paper is to examine the effect on localization accuracy of the number N of participating robots and the accuracy of the sensors employed. More specifically, we investigate the improvement in localizatio...