Person recognition for service robotics applications

The acceptance of service robots comes along with the ability to adapt to user specific preferences. This requires that a robot can determine the identity of the user. As for humans, robust user recognition is based on the identification of the face. However, despite the plethora of published work on face recognition that is robust against real world noise such as illumination, head alignment or facial expressions there is no robust off-the-shelf non-commercial software available to be used in typical robotics applications. Hence, this paper introduces a ready-to-use open-source ROS package providing a face detection and identification system that is comprising novel and state-of-the-art solutions to various aspects of face recognition while utilizing modern RGB-D sensors. This work demonstrates a solution for face recognition in robotic settings that is robust against varying illumination, gaze directions of the head, and facial expressions while operating with online performance. The paper provides a thorough evaluation of the face recognition system based on standard database tests and on real world scenarios regarding these criteria. The work described in this project was partially funded by the European project ACCOMPANY (Acceptable robotics COMPanions for AgeiNg Years). Grant agreement no.: 287624