Human Recognition in RGBD Combining Object Detectors and Conditional Random Fields

This paper addresses the problem of detecting and segmenting human instances in a point cloud. Both fields have been well studied during the last decades showing impressive results, not only in accuracy but also in computational performance. With the rapid use of depth sensors, a resurgent need for improving existing state-of-the-art algorithms, integrating depth information as an additional constraint became more ostensible. Current challenges involve combining RGB and depth information for reasoning about location and spatial extend of the object of interest. We make use of an improved deformable part model algorithm, allowing to deform the individual parts across multiple scales, approximating the location of the person in the scene and a conditional random field energy function for specifying the object’s spatial extent. Our proposed energy function models up to pairwise relations defined in the RGBD domain, enforcing label consistency for regions sharing similar unary and pairwise measurements. Experimental results show that our proposed energy func- tion provides a fairly precise segmentation even when the resulting detection box is imprecise. Reasoning about the detection algorithm could potentially enhance the quality of the detection box allowing capturing the object of interest as a whole.