Infrared image based human victim recognition for a search and rescue robot

In this paper, we propose an infrared image based human victim recognition method for a search and rescue robot in dark environments, like general disaster situations. For recognizing a human victim, an infrared camera on a RGB-D camera, Microsoft Kinect, is used. The contrast and brightness of the infrared image are first improved by histogram equalization, and the noise on the image is removed by morphological operation and Gaussian filtering. For recognizing a human victim, the binarization and blob labeling methods are applied to the improved image. Finally, for verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method, an experiment for human victim recognition is carried out in a dark environment.