Human figure recognition and the estimation of its direction

Abstract

This work describes a method used to recognize a person situated in indoor environments. It estimates the direction in which the person is turned. The position coordinates are known to the system thanks to localization techniques that use Bluetooth technology. The utilization of such information in intelligent environments allows the execution of actions that interact with the customer. The paper focuses on our human figure recognition technique, which uses image analysis to calculate the direction angle a person is turned towards. Figure recognition is accomplished by comparing the colours of the body parts that mark it out, such as: hair colour, face colour, and clothes colour. The calculation of the direction is finally achieved by the analysis of the regions that identify face, hair, and shoes in comparison with body axis. Our software implements a new technique to represent a boundary (path of line) which makes the operations between sets, and the valuation of the inner pixels, simple and fast.