Using a Deep Learning Model on Images to Obtain a 2D Laser People Detector for a Mobile Robot

Recent improvements in deep learning techniques applied to images allow the detection of people with a high success rate. However, other types of sensors, such as laser rangefinders, are still useful due to their wide field of vision and their ability to operate in different environments and lighting conditions. In this work we use an interesting computational intelligence technique such as the deep learning method to detect people in images taken by a mobile robot. The masks of the people in the images are used to automatically label a set of samples formed by 2D laser range data that will allow us to detect the legs of people present in the scene. The samples are geometric characteristics of the clusters built from the laser data. The machine learning algorithms are used to learn a classifier that is capable of detecting people from only 2D laser range data. Our people detector is compared to a state-of-the-art classifier. Our proposal achieves a higher value of F1 in the test set using an unbalanced dataset. To improve accuracy, the final classifier has been generated from a balanced training set. This final classifier has also been evaluated using a test set in which we have obtained very high accuracy values in each class. The contribution of this work is 2-fold. On the one hand, our proposal performs an automatic labeling of the samples so that the dataset can be collected under real operating conditions. On the other hand, the robot can detect people in a wider field of view than if we only used a camera, and in this way can help build more robust behaviors. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).