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Robust Children Behavior Tracking for Childcare Assisting Robot by Using Multiple Kinect Sensors

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9979))

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Abstract

Recently, the requirement for the high qualified childcare schools keeps increasing, but the number of qualified nursery teachers is far from enough. Developing a childcare assisting robot is highly necessary to help the works of nursery teachers. To work like a human nursery teacher, the first challenge for the robot is to understand the behaviors of the children automatically so that the robot can give adaptive reactions to the children. In this paper, we developed a robust children behavior tracking system by using multiple Kinect sensors. Each of the child is detected and recognized by integrating his/her personal features of face, color and motion. The tracking process is realized by using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) particle filter. The experiments are conducted in a childcare school to show the usefulness of our system.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas 26118003. Special thanks to all the members in the nursery school.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Tokyo, 182-8585, Japan

    Bin Zhang, Tomoaki Nakamura, Takayuki Nagai, Kasumi Abe & Masahide Kaneko

  2. Otsuma Women’s University, Chiyoda, Tokyo, 102-8357, Japan

    Rena Ushiogi

  3. Tamagawa University, Machida, Tokyo, 194-8610, Japan

    Takashi Omori

  4. Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto, 606-8585, Japan

    Natsuki Oka

Authors
  1. Bin Zhang
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  2. Tomoaki Nakamura
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  3. Rena Ushiogi
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  4. Takayuki Nagai
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  5. Kasumi Abe
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  6. Takashi Omori
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  7. Natsuki Oka
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  8. Masahide Kaneko
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bin Zhang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Indiana, USA

    Arvin Agah

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  3. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

    Ayanna M. Howard

  4. Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, University Carlos III de Madrid, madrid, Spain

    Miguel A. Salichs

  5. Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

    Hongsheng He

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Zhang, B. et al. (2016). Robust Children Behavior Tracking for Childcare Assisting Robot by Using Multiple Kinect Sensors. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, JJ., Howard, A., Salichs, M., He, H. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9979. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_63

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_63

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47436-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47437-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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