A Robust Visual Person-Following Approach for Mobile Robots in Disturbing Environments

This article proposes a robust visual following approach with a deep learning-based person detector, a Kalman filter (KF), and a reidentification module. The KF is introduced to predict the position of the target person, and its state is updated by the associated detection result. To deal with severe distractions and even full occlusion, the reidentification module with an identification model, a verification model, and an appearance gallery is employed in multi-person disturbing environments. Without any customized markers, the proposed approach can follow the target person steadily, and it is robust to occlusion and posture changes of the target person. Experiments results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.