Automatic Person Identification using Multiple Cues

This paper describes a method for vision-based person identification that can detect, track, and recognize person from video using multiple cues: height and dressing colors. The method does not require constrained target's pose or fully frontal face image to identify the person. First, the system, which is connected to a pan-tilt-zoom camera, detects target using motion detection and human cardboard model. The system keeps tracking the moving target while it is trying to identify whether it is a human and identify who it is among the registered persons in the database. To segment the moving target from the background scene, we employ a version of background subtraction technique and some spatial filtering. Once the target is segmented, we then align the target with the generic human cardboard model to verify whether the detected target is a human. If the target is identified as a human, the card board model is also used to segment the body parts to obtain some salient features such as head, torso, and legs. The whole body silhouette is also analyzed to obtain the target's shape information such as height and slimness. We then use these multiple cues (at present, we uses shirt color, trousers color, and body height) to recognize the target using a supervised self-organization process. We preliminary tested the system on a set of 5 subjects with multiple clothes. The recognition rate is 100% if the person is wearing the clothes that were learned before. In case a person wears new dresses the system fail to identify. This means height is not enough to classify persons. We plan to extend the work by adding more cues such as skin color, and face recognition by utilizing the zoom capability of the camera to obtain high resolution view of face; then, evaluate the system with more subjects.