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We address the problem of extracting human body posture labels, upper body orientation and the spatial location of individual body parts from near-infrared (NIR) images depicting patterns of retro-reflective markers. The analyzed patterns originate from the observation of humans equipped with protective high-visibility garments that represent common safety equipment in the industrial sector. Exploiting the shape of the observed reflectors we adopt shape matching based on the chamfer distance and infer one of seven discrete body posture labels as well as the approximate upper body orientation with respect to the camera. We then proceed to analyze the NIR images on a pixel scale and estimate a figure-ground segmentation together with human body part labels using classification of densely extracted local image patches. Our results indicate a body posture classification accuracy of 80% and figure-ground segmentations with 87% accuracy.

So far, autonomous order picking (commissioning) systems have not been able to meet the stringent demands regarding speed, safety, and accuracy of real-world warehouse automation, resulting in reliance on human workers. In this letter, we target the next step in autonomous robot commissioning: automatizing the currently manual order picking procedure. To this end, we investigate the use case of autonomous picking and palletizing with a dedicated research platform and discuss lessons learned during testing in simplified warehouse settings. The main theoretical contribution is a novel grasp representation scheme which allows for redundancy in the gripper pose placement. This redundancy is exploited by a local, prioritized kinematic controller which generates reactive manipulator motions on-the-fly. We validated our grasping approach by means of a large set of experiments, which yielded an average grasp acquisition time of $23.5\;\text{s}$ at a success rate of $94.7\%$ . Our system is able to autonomously carry out simple order picking tasks in a human-safe manner, and as such serves as an initial step toward future commercial-scale in-house logistics automation solutions.

We address the problem of human detection from heavy mobile machinery and robotic equipment operating at industrial working sites. Exploiting the fact that workers are typically obliged to wear high-visibility clothing with reflective markers, we propose a new recognition algorithm that specifically incorporates the highly discriminative features of the safety garments in the detection process. Termed Multi-band Hough Forest, our detector fuses the input from active near-infrared (NIR) and RGB color vision to learn a human appearance model that not only allows us to detect and localize industrial workers, but also to estimate their body orientation. We further propose an efficient pipeline for automated generation of training data with high-quality body part annotations that are used in training to increase detector performance. We report a thorough experimental evaluation on challenging image sequences from a real-world production environment, where persons appear in a variety of upright and non-upright body positions.

This chapter presents a novel possible solution for people detection and estimation of their 3D position in challenging shared environments. Addressing safety critical applications in industrial environments, we make the basic assumption that people wear reflective vests. In order to detect these vests and to discriminate them from other reflective material, we propose an approach based on a single camera equipped with an IR flash. The camera acquires pairs of images, one with and one without IR flash, in short succession. The images forming a pair are then related to each other through feature tracking, which allows to discard features for which the relative intensity difference is small and which are thus not believed to belong to a reflective vest. Next, the local neighbourhood of the remaining features is further analysed. First, a Random Forest classifier is used to discriminate between features caused by a reflective vest and features caused by some other reflective materials. Second, the distance between the camera and the vest features is estimated using a Random Forest regressor. The proposed system was evaluated in one indoor and two challenging outdoor scenarios. Our results indicate very good classification performance and remarkably accurate distance estimation especially in combination with the SURF descriptor, even under direct exposure to sunlight.

We propose and evaluate a system for detecting and tracking multiple humans wearing high-visibility clothing from vehicles operating in industrial work environments. We use a customized stereo camera setup equipped with IR flash and IR filter to detect the reflective material on the worker's garments and estimate their trajectories in 3D space. An evaluation in two distinct industrial environments with different degrees of complexity demonstrates the approach to be robust and accurate for tracking workers in arbitrary body poses, under occlusion, and under a wide range of different illumination settings.

We report on a novel vision-based method for reliable human detection from vehicles operating in industrial environments in the vicinity of workers. By exploiting the fact that reflective vests represent a standard safety equipment on most industrial worksites, we use a single camera system and active IR illumination to detect humans by identifying the reflective vest markers. Adopting a sparse feature based approach, we classify vest markers against other reflective material and perform supervised learning of the object distance based on local image descriptors. The integration of the resulting per-feature 3D position estimates in a particle filter finally allows to perform human tracking in conditions ranging from broad daylight to complete darkness.