This paper proposes a novel face detection method that finds tiny faces located at a long range even with low-resolution input images captured by a mobile robot. The proposed approach can locate extremely small-sized face regions of 12x12 pixels. We solve a tiny face detection problem by organizing a system that consists of multiple detectors including a mean-shift color tracker, short- and long-rage face detectors, and an omega shape detector. The proposed method adopts the long-range face detector that is well trained enough to detect tiny faces at a long range, and limiting its operation to only within a search region that is automatically determined by the mean-shift color tracker and the omega shape detector. By focusing on limiting the face search region as much as possible, the proposed method can accurately detect tiny faces at a long distance even with a low-resolution image, and decrease false positives sharply. According to the experimental results on realistic databases, the performance of the proposed approach is at a sufficiently practical level for various robot applications such as face recognition of non-cooperative users, human-following, and gesture recognition for long-range interaction.

For an advanced intelligent service, the need of HRI technology has recently been increasing and the technology has been also improved. However, HRI components have been evaluated under stable and controlled laboratory environments and there are no evaluation results of performance in real environments. Therefore, robot service providers and users have not been getting sufficient information on the level of current HRI technology. In this paper, we provide the evaluation results of the performance of the HRI components on the robot platforms providing actual services in pilot service sites. For the evaluation, we select face detection component, speaker gender classification component and sound localization component as representative HRI components closing to the commercialization. The goal of this paper is to provide valuable information and reference performance on appling the HRI components to real robot environments.