Silhouette Extraction of Human Body Using Color and Gradient Information

Human motion analysis is an important research subject in human-robot interaction (HRI). However, before analyzing the human motion, silhouette of human body should be extracted from sequential images obtained by CCD camera. The intelligent robot system requires more robust silhouette extraction method because it has internal vibration and low resolution and insufficient silhouette information. In this paper, we discuss the color and gradient based silhouette extraction method for detecting and tracking the human motion. The proposed method is to combine and optimize the color region subtraction and temporal and spatial gradient subtraction information. Also, we propose some compensation methods so as not to miss silhouette information due to poor images. Finally, we have shown the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method through some experiments.