Tracking Focus of Attention for Human-Robot Communication - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Tracking Focus of Attention for Human-Robot Communication

Rainer Stiefelhagen, Jie Yang, and Alex Waibel
Conference Paper, Proceedings of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids '01), November, 2001

Abstract

In an intelligent working space, social robots should be capable of detecting and understanding human communicative cues. An important cue in human communication is focus of attention expressed by gaze direction. We have been developing technologies for gaze tracking and focus of attention modeling. In this paper we present our work on modeling focus of attention in meeting situations. We employ neural networks to estimate a persons head pose from camera images, and a probabilistic model to identify interesting targets in the scene based on the observed head pose. We are extending such technologies in building a gaze-aware human-friendly robot that is able to monitor a person's focus of attention.

BibTeX

@conference{Stiefelhagen-2001-8348,
author = {Rainer Stiefelhagen and Jie Yang and Alex Waibel},
title = {Tracking Focus of Attention for Human-Robot Communication},
booktitle = {Proceedings of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids '01)},
year = {2001},
month = {November},
}