Simultaneous Children Recognition and Tracking for Childcare Assisting System by Using Kinect Sensors
Bin Zhang, Tomoaki Nakamura, Rena Ushiogi, Takayuki Nagai, Kasumi Abe, Takashi Omori, Natsuki Oka, Masahide Kaneko · Journal of Signal and Information Processing · 2016
Developing a childcare assisting system is highly necessary due to the lack of nursery teachers, and it will make an important progress on effective utilization of nursery teacher resources. In this paper, we proposed simultaneous children recognition and tracking system by using Kinect sensors for the childcare assisting system to provide information for the nursery teachers. Each of the children is recognized by integrating his/her personal information of color, face and motion. The tracking problem is modeled as finding the MAP solution of a posterior probability, and is solved by using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) particle filter. Our system can recognize and robustly track each child during class activities. Trajectories, motion ranges and relative distances information can be provided for the nursery teachers to assist their childcare work. The effectiveness of our system is proved through continuous monitoring of the children in a nursery school.