Localization of Humans, Objects, and Robots Interacting on Load-Sensing Floors

Localization, tracking, and recognition of objects and humans are basic tasks that are of high value in the applications of ambient intelligence. Sensing floors were introduced to address these tasks in a non-intrusive way. To recognize the humans moving on the floor, they are usually first localized, and then a set of gait features are extracted (stride length, cadence, and pressure profile over a footstep). However, recognition generally fails when several people stand or walk together, preventing successful tracking. This paper presents a detection, tracking, and recognition technique which uses objects' weight. It continues working even when tracking individual persons becomes impossible. Inspired by computer vision, this technique processes the floor pressure-image by segmenting the blobs containing objects, tracking them, and recognizing their contents through a mix of inference and combinatorial search. The result lists the probabilities of assignments of known objects to observed blobs. The concept was successfully evaluated in daily life activity scenarii, involving multi-object tracking and recognition on low-resolution sensors, crossing of user trajectories, and weight ambiguity. This technique can be used to provide a probabilistic input for multi-modal object tracking and recognition systems.