Human Detection and Gesture Recognition Based on Ambient Intelligence.pdf

13 Human Detection and Gesture Recognition Based on Ambient Intelligence Naoyuki Kubota Tokyo Metropolitan University Japan 1. Introduction Recently, various types of human-friendly robots such as pet robots, amusement robots, and partner robots, have been developed for the next generation society. The human-friendly robots should perform human recognition, voice recognition, and gesture recognition in order to realize natural communication with a human. Furthermore, the robots should coexist in the human environments based on learning and adaptation. However, it is very difficult for the robot to successfully realize these capabilities and functions under real world conditions. Two different approaches have been discussed to improve these capabilities and functions of the robots. One approach is to use conventional intelligent technologies based on various sensors equipped on a robot. As a result, the size of a robot becomes large. The other approach is to use ambient intelligence technologies of environmental systems based on the structured information available to a robot. The robot directly receives the environmental information through a local area network without measurement by the robot itself. In the following, we explain the current status of researches on sensor networks and interactive behavior acquisition from the viewpoint of ambient intelligence. 1.1 Ambient Intelligence For the development of sensor network and ubiquitous computing, we should discuss the intelligence technologies in the whole system of robots and environmental systems. Here intelligence technologies related with measurement, transmission, modeling, and control of environmental information is called ambient intelligence. The concept of ambient intelligence was discussed by Hagras et.al. (Doctor et al., 2005). Their main aim is to improve the qualities of life based on computational artifacts, but we focus on the technologies for the co-existence of humans an