IEEE Latin American Robotic Symposium

Human Detection Using Thermopiles

Jos Luis Honorato, Ignacio Spiniak, Miguel Torres-Torriti e
Abstract This paper presents a simple approach to detect people using an 81 thermopile array sensor. The performance of the sensor is evaluated in terms of detection rates and false positives obtained in the application of the sensor to people counting at doorways and pedestrian detection from a mobile robot in a real environment. To ensure that people is detectable regardless of the ambient temperature, the proposed method normalizes the temperatures according to a model for the maximum expected skin temperature as a function of the ambient temperature. The working principles and characterization of the thermopile sensor are also presented. This should be of interest and pedagogical value to many roboticists who wish to equip their robot with a rather effective passive infrared sensor, which unlike vision-based methods is not affected by changes in the illumination conditions of the environment.

detection and general performance of a thermopile-based people detection system that can be used both in pedestrian counting applications at doorways or as human detector for mobile robots. Besides the technical contributions, this paper should be of pedagogical value to roboticists wishing to equip their robot with thermopile sensors, as it explains the basic working principles of thermopiles in the next section. The performance of the thermopile-based human detection system is evaluated in two different real applications: (i) human detection and counting at doorways, see g. 1 (a), and (ii) human detection and counting from a mobile robot, see g. 1 (b). Human detection from a mobile robot is particularly important in human-robot interaction and human following by autonomous mobile robots. Most detection systems for human following robots proposed in the literature usually employ computer vision techniques [1], [2]. The method in [1] incorporates sonar measurements in addition to the visual information to cope with the problem of confusing moving background objects, which is one of the limitations of [2]. Other researchers have proposed using active systems in which persons have to wear an emitter, for example, in [3] persons must wear an IR or sonar emitter. While this approach can be effective for a robot escort, it provides a very limited degree of autonomy to the robot. Thermopiles have been used also in some competition robots for search and rescue missions and reghting. An exploration algorithm that combines measurements from a laser range nder and a thermopile sensor for a rescue robot is proposed in [12]. The robot is tested in a simulated environment at the RoboCup 2007 German Open, but no characterization of the thermopile performance as applied to people detection is presented. The use of the same thermopiles to search for re is presented in [13], however, this work also does not explore the detection of people. Other robots that use passive infrared sensors for people detection have been proposed in [4], [9], [14]. These robots rely on pyroelectric sensors, such as those employed in burglar alarms. Pyroelectric sensors respond to changes in infrared radiation not to the presence of an IR source. This is a disadvantage because requires that the source is either moving or that its emitted radiation is permanently chopped with some shutter or by rotating the sensor along certain slits, for further details see [5]. The paper is organized as follows. The next section presents the basic physical principles that are involved in thermal radiation measurement using thermopiles. Section III explains the proposed human detection and counting system. The testing methodology and experimental results are discussed in sections IV and V, respectively. Conclusions and topic of ongoing research are addressed in section VI.

I. I NTRODUCCION The ability to detect people is very important in many different areas, among which human-robot interaction [1], [2], [3], workcell safety [4], [5], people counting [6], surveillance and tracking [7], [8], [9] are the most common; see also [10], [11]. The type of sensors employed is diverse as the application areas, for example, simple intruder alarms rely on infra-red (IR) pyroelectric detectors [11], while advanced driver assistance systems employ cameras, laser range nders, and may even use expensive IR microbolometers focal plane arrays (FPAs). This work presents the development of a simple people detector and counter based on a thermopile array. Thermopiles are stacks of junctions of two different material, which produce a voltage proportional to the temperature difference at the junction. If a heat absorber is adequately connected to one side of the junction, thermopiles provide an effective contactless method for measuring the temperature of objects. This makes them a suitable sensor for human detection with two key advantages. First, thermopiles are passive sensors, which means they do not require to radiate energy to the environment as a laser range nder, and therefore, are not affected by the reectivity of the materials and are undetectable. Secondly, and most importantly, thermopiles measure heat, i.e. infrared radiation, in the 2 20 m, and thus are not affected by changes in the scene illumination as regular vision-based methods. With the development of new semiconductor manufacturing technologies, mass production of thermopiles has made them affordable for commercial applications to the point they are becoming common even in robotic competitions, e.g. [12]. However, no sensor characterizations and assessments about their performance in human detection applications have being presented in the existing literature. Therefore, another goal of this paper is to provide an evaluation of the rate of
This work was supported by Conycit of Chile under PBCT Grant ACT-32 and Fondecyt Grant 11060251, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Ponticia Universidad Cat lica de Chile, Vicu a Mackenna 4860, Casilla 306-22, Sano n tiago, Chile {ispiniak, jlhonora, mtorrest}@ing.puc.cl

978-0-7695-3536-4/08 $25.00 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/LARS.2010.21

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TABLE I S ENSORS FOR THERMAL RADIATION MEASUREMENT. Sensor Pyroelectric Operation Principle Primary: Polarization change, i.e. change in the electric dipole moments due to temperature variations. Secondary: Piezoelectric effect from thermal expansion. Thermoelectricy/Seebeck Effect (as in thermocouples) resulting from carrier distribution changes (diffusion) and an increase in the effective mass of conduction electrons due to interactions with the crystal lattice in which the electrons move (phonon drag) at the junction of two different materials. Change in resistance (as in thermistors or RTDs) generated by a change in the number of electrons promoted into the conduction band able to move and carry charge.

Thermopile

Bolometer

(a)

(b) stem from the physical principles governing the operation of these sensors (summarized in Table I) and translate into thermopiles being cheaper and simpler to manufacture for small-sized arrays than pyroelectric and bolometric devices. The latter can be reduced to smaller dimensions to create much larger and uniform FPAs, and thus are common in IR thermography and IR vision cameras with resolutions in the range 320 140640 280, currently costing 100-200 times more than an 8 1 thermopile, which sells for about USD 100120. Clearly, the value of IR vision sensors is simply still prohibitive for most mass market personal and industrial robotics applications. III. H UMAN D ETECTION AND C OUNTING S YSTEM A. Sensor Description The proposed detection system is based on a TPA81 thermal sensor developed by Devantech Ltd. [19], which is shown in Fig. 2. This sensor is based on a PerkinElmer a2TPMI 334 L5.5 8 1 thermopile array, which converts IR radiation in the 2-22 m band of the spectrum to a voltage signal. The response of the TPA81 sensor as a function of the wavelength of the IR radiation is practically constant, making this sensor suitable for detecting body heat, which peaks at the 10 m wavelength. The thermopile array in the TPA81 sensor has equivalent characteristics to those of the PerkinElmer thermopile linear module TPLM086L5.5, which is packaged in TO-39 housing and has a silicon lens with focal distance f = 5.5 mm and a eld of view (FOV) of 41 6 . The thermopile can measure object temperatures in the range 20to 100 C. The temperature reference slope for this sensor is 10 mV /K with an output noise of 0.4 mV / Hz in the .520Hz interval. This translates into practical accuracy of 3 C 2% from 4 C to 10 C and 2 C 2% from 10 C to 100 C. The sensor outputs discrete-valued measurements with a temperature resolution of 1 C via an I2C bus. Noting that each sensing element of the thermopile array has a FOV of 5.125 6 , the area covered by each element for an object at 1 m is about 910.5 cm, and obviously much larger for object further away. However, the energy density of the radiating body decreases as the distance between the source and the sensor increases. This imposes a practical limit on the working distance of the sensor. Practical experiments allowed us to obtain body temperatures as the distance

Fig. 1. Human detection applications: (a) counting pedestrians at one of the campus building doorways, (b) people detection for mobile robots.

II. T HERMOPILE F UNDAMENTALS Modern thermopiles consist of a stack or pile of seriallyconnected thermocouples on micromachined silicon chips. Each thermocouple generates a voltage which is proportional to the temperature difference between two materials that are connected at one end. This thermoelectric effect, known as Seebeck effect was discovered by Thomas Johann Seebeck in 1821 [15], although the idea of stacking thermocouples was later developed by Leopoldo Nobili in 1829, by connecting bismuth and copper elements. Nobilis work was fundamental to the understanding that light and heat radiation differ only in their wavelengths [16]. Measurement of an objects temperature at a distance is possible if the energy radiated by the object is collected by an absorber attached to the thermocouple junction. By the Stefan-Boltzmann law the power radiated by an object with thermodynamic temperature Tobj and area A is given by: 4 (1) Pobj = A obj Tobj where obj is the objects emissivity and = 5.67 108 J/(s m2 K 4 ) is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. From the heat-balance equation, the net radiation power P rad received by the thermopile is equal to the power radiated by the object minus the power radiated by the thermopile at ambient temperature: 4 4 Prad = K obj Tobj sen Tsen (2) where K = K sin2 (/2) is a constant that depends on the eld-of-view (FOV) of the sensor ; [17]. Due to the Seebeck effect, the thermopile generates a voltage V T P which is proportional to P rad according to a constant of sensitivity S, i.e. VT P = S Prad . Solving this equation for a measured ambient temperature T sen = Tamb and voltage VT P yields the object temperature T obj [18]. It is worth pointing out some differences with respect to other passive infrared (PIR) sensing devices: (i) unlike pyroelectric sensors, whose output is proportional to the rate of change of the objects temperature, the output of thermopiles is proportional to the difference between the object and the ambient temperature, (ii) unlike bolometer-based devices, thermopiles do not require special temperature stabilization to prevent the measurements from drifting. These differences

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Fig. 2.
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Devantechs 8 1 thermopile array TPA81.

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Fig. 4. Graphic representation of 30 samples of data obtained by the 8 1 thermopile array. Red indicates warmer points, while lemon green y coldest measurements.

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Fig. 3.

Normalized sensed temperature versus distance.

increases. These temperatures were normalized using the methodology explained in the next subsection and plotted in gure 3. From this gure is possible to establish that the working distance is slightly above 2 m for a threshold = 0.2. B. Detection Algorithm The proposed approach takes advantage of the fact that body heat radiation is above that of other objects in the environment, which normally are not heat producing sources. By normalizing and comparing the measured temperatures with respect to an adequately set threshold, it is possible to determine when a person is passing by or standing in front of the sensor. Central to our approach is the dynamic adjustment of the threshold, which takes into account the fact that the heat emitted by a persons skin is affected by the ambient temperature [20]. If T(k) = max{T1 (k), T2 (k), . . . , T8 (k)} denotes the greatest of the eight temperatures measured by the 8 1 thermopile array on time instant k corresponding to time tk = t0 + kTs , where Ts is the sampling interval, then the detection process process can be summarized in the following steps:
def

and attenuate the measurement noise produced by random variations of the environment temperature and the sensing electronics. Measurements are ltered using a simple rstorder innite impulse response (IIR) lter of the form: T(k) = (1 )T(k 1) + T(k) = T(k 1) + T(k) T(k 1) (3) where T(k) is the ltered temperature at instant k and is the update rate. The fact that is an update rate, can be seen from the second equation which updates the old temperature estimate at instant k 1 by adding a correction term proportional to the error between the new temperature T(k) and the old estimate T(k 1) to produce the new estimate T(k). It should be clear that the ltering action disappears as 1, while the ltering action becomes strong as 0, vanishing completely the effects of the input on the output when = 0. Since moving pedestrians produce variations in just a few samples and the level of noise is low, must be chosen large enough so that the smoothing does not vanishes the measurements of interest. Good values for were experimentally found to be around 0.5. It is also important to mention that small values of do not only have an effect of reducing the inuence of the input on the output, but also have the undesirable effect of retarding the response of the lters output to changes in the input. The next step is to normalize the ltered measurements T with respect to the difference between expected maximum skin temperature Ts and the estimated background temperature Tb according to: T(k) Tb (k) (4) T(k) = Ts (k) Tb (k) It is to be noted that the expected maximum skin temperature depends on the existing estimated ambient temperature T a , hence the dependence on k. The studies reported in [20] are employed to implement a model for the skin temperature Ts in terms of Ta . The model is given by the following expression: Ts = c2 T2 + c1 Ta + c0 [ C] (5) a with c0 = 6.037, c1 = 1, 555, c2 = 0.019799. These coefcients imply a maximum skin temperature T s of 36.57 C

Filtering the measurements T(k) to produce the ltered values T(k). Updating the background temperature T b (k). Normalizing the ltered values T(k) in terms of the difference between the expected maximum skin temperature Ts (k) and the background temperature T b (k). Thresholding the normalized temperature T(k).

The purpose of the rst step is to smooth the signals

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Fig. 5.

Skin temperature Ts versus background temperature Ta .

Fig. 6. Value of the normalized temperature T showing to persons passing by the sensor.

when the ambient temperature T a is 39.27 C. From (5), clearly Ts = 6.037 C when Ta = 0 C. Figure 5 shows the curve resulting from (5) for the expected Ts given Ta . It should be clear that as ambient temperature decreases, the skin temperature also decreases; hence, the normalization equation (4) has to be adjusted so that measured temperatures are scaled with respect to the maximum expected skin temperature, and not the internal body temperature. This allows to use a constant threshold, which otherwise would have to be decreased whenever the ambient temperature decreases, and increased when the ambient temperature increases in order to prevent false detections from happening. The estimated background temperature T b is obtained by calculating the statistical mode of the last 30 temperatures measured with the thermopile, instead of using the actual ambient temperature. This is because during experiments it was found that the measured ambient (air) temperature from the internal thermistor was usually higher than the temperature of the surrounding objects as measured by the thermopiles. Finally, the detection of a person is produced when: T (6)

people height, walking speed and ambient temperature on accuracy. The rst group of experiments involves detecting people crossing a doorway. The second experiment involved testing the sensor mounted on a mobile robot to detect pedestrians in an outdoor environment as the robot navigated around. Figure 7 shows the sensor position congurations considered in the experiments carried out at different doorways. In experiment (a), the sensor was located in the upper part of the doorway at 2.3 m above the oor pointing down. During experiment (b), the sensor was located in one of the upper corners of the doorway and pointed at 45 within the plane of the doorway. The third conguration, experiment (c), considers a sensor located in the upper part of the doorway like in experiment (a), however, the sensor is aimed at an angle of 45 , towards the people entering the building. In the nal experiment (d), the sensor was located on one side of the door frame at a height of 1.6 m aimed within the plane of the doorway. All experiments involved measuring the number of times the system correctly detected people crossing the doorway. A total of 200 hundred persons walked through the doorway during this experiment at a regular walking speed of 1 m/s. The height of the people was 1.7 .1 m. The ambient temperature was 24 C when the test was performed. In order to test the detection system under the most demanding conditions, some people wore a hood, so that only the face would be detectable. Testing the rate of false detections involved uninterrupted data collection for a period of 30 minutes with no people crossing through the doorway. Once the best conguration was identied, the following rounds of experiments were carried out to assess the effects of certain variables on the detection accuracy: 1) Persons height: Variations with respect to the groups average height were generated by locating the sensor at specic increments or decrements with respect to the average height. 2) Walking speed: People were asked to walk at different constant speeds on each of the different trials. 3) Ambient temperature: The room air conditioning sys-

where is the detection threshold. It was experimentally veried that a threshold value that ensures a good detection rate while minimizing the misdetections or false positives is = 0.2. The people counter is incremented each time the value of T changes from any level below the threshold to a level above it, i.e. at sampling time k the people count is incremented if T(k) and T(k 1) < . This prevents the system from counting people more than once if someone stands for longer periods of time in front of the sensor. Figure 6 shows the value of the normalized temperature T corresponding to the 30 samples shown in 4. It is possible to see that the selected threshold = .2 provides an adequate detection level, which allows to observe the presence of two persons passing by. IV. T ESTING M ETHODOLOGY Several tests were performed to assess the sensor location that maximizes detection rates, and evaluate the inuence of

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TABLE III R ESULTS OBTAINED FOR DIFFERENT RELATIVE HEIGHTS OF PEOPLE WITH RESPECT TO THE SENSOR USING SENSOR CONFIGURATION ( D ). h [cm] Correct Detections [%] 15 90 0 95 -15 62 -30 51 Fig. 7. Sensor location congurations employed in the experiments. TABLE IV R ESULTS OBTAINED FOR PEOPLE WALKING AT DIFFERENT SPEEDS USING SENSOR CONFIGURATION ( D ). velocity [m/s] Correct Detections [%] 0.5 98 1 95 2 90

TABLE II R ESULTS OBTAINED USING THE SENSOR CONFIGURATIONS OF FIG . 7. Experiment A B C D Correct Detections [%] 56 88 50 95 Multiple Detections [%] 0.5 0 10 0 False Detections (in 30 minutes) 7 15 51 8

tem was used to modify the ambient temperature and repeat the experiments at different ambient temperatures. Finally, the best conguration was tested under real conditions, in which all the main variables (height, walking speed, ambient temperature) were allowed to vary. To this end, the sensor was located at the main entrance of the campus engineering building. Figure 1 (a) shows the doorway precisely when the challenging situation of detecting someone wearing a hood occurs because that they was cold and rainy with temperatures between 12 and 17 C. V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS A. Sensor Conguration Expriments Table II presents the detection and failure rates obtained for each of the sensor congurations shown in g. 7. From these results it is possible to conclude that the best sensor location is provided by the fourth conguration (d), in which the sensor is located at 1.6 m above the oor on one side of the doorway pointing within the plane of the doorway. This conguration not only results in a high detection rate of 95%, but also exhibits low false detections. Experiment C revealed that it is not a good idea to point the sensor in a direction not contained in the plane of the doorway because this signicantly increases the rate of false detections due to the fact that the sensor is more exposed to background disturbances. B. People Height Experiments Table III shows the results obtained considering variations on the relative height of the persons with respect to the height at which the sensor is located. To this end, the experiments considered increments h = {30, 15, 0, 15} relative to the group average height (1.7 m). These increments, correspond to people with heights 1.4 m, 1.55 m, 1.7 m and 1.85 m, or in terms of age from 10-11 year old children to full grown up people. The results show that the best detection

rate is achieved when the sensor is located at the same level of the persons head, and misses about 50% of the people if their heads are 30 cm below the sensor. This means that multiple sensors would be required at different heights to ensure the accuracy of a deployable system. C. Walking Speed Experiments The purpose of these experiments was to test the robustness of the detection system with respect to changes in the walking speed of the people passing through the doorway. To this end, people were asked to walk at different speeds of about 0.5 m/s (slow paced), 1 m/s (regular walking speed) and 2 m/s (fast paced). Table IV shows that the slower the person walks, the greater detection probabilities will be and hence the higher detection rates. Slowing the speed has an equivalent effect as increasing the sampling rate for a given speed. Since an RF 19.200 bauds link was being used, the actual sampling period was T s = 0.75 more than seven times slower than when a wire is employed to connect the sensor to the PC. It was veried that, as expected, the detection accuracy improved when faster sampling rates were used. D. Ambient Temperature Experiments To determine the effects of temperature on the detection rates, three experiments were carried out changing the temperature of the room using the heating and air conditioning system. The experiment was also carried out using sensor conguration (d). People were asked to walk at regular speed (1 m/s). The results shown in Table V indicate that the detection becomes more difcult as background temperature increases. This should come as no surprise, since the difference between the body and background temperature decreases as the ambient temperature increases. E. High-Trafc Entrance Experiment Measurements were taken at one of the entrances to the lobby of the School of Engineering building to assess the performance of the sensor in a real uncontrolled environment (g. 1 (a)). This entrance provides an ideal testing location

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TABLE V R ESULTS OBTAINED FOR DIFFERENT AMBIENT TEMPERATURES USING SENSOR CONFIGURATION ( D ). Ambient Temp. [ C] Correct Detections [%] 18 98 22 96 24 95 TABLE VI R ESULTS OBATINED FOR A HIGH - TRAFFIC DOORWAY. Correct Detections [%] 95.7 Missed Detections [%] 2.9 Multiple Detections [%] 1.4 False Detections (in 30 minutes) 18

TABLE VII R ESULTS OBATINED FOR THE MOBILE ROBOT. Correct Detections [%] 62.9 Missed Detections [%] 35.2 Multiple Detections [%] 1.85 False Detections (in 15 minutes) 16

with high pedestrians trafc. As earlier mentioned, it was cold and rainy during the testing day. This offered a good challenge to the system because people were wearing large jackets and sometimes even hoods which difculted the visibility of skin. Despite of these challenging conditions, a 95.7% rate of detection was achieved as shown in Table VI. This level of accuracy is quite good if compared to commercial systems which cost 1025 times more and offer similar levels of accuracy between 95%97%. A total of 210 pedestrians crossed the doorway during the time data was collected to obtain the results shown in Table VI. This means that only 6 people out of the 210 were missed. F. Mobile Robot Experiments The thermopile sensor was placed on an Activmedia P3AT mobile robot as shown in g. 1 (b). Sensor data was registered for a period of 15 minutes for which 54 persons walked within the sensors eld of view. During the acquisition period, the measured ambient temperature was 24 C, however, the measured background temperature was on average around 16 C. This difference is explained by the fact that the measurements were performed in the morning, and although it was a warmer day than the average last days of autumn, the previous day had been rather cold and background objects still had not absorbed enough heat to narrow the difference between the ambient and the background temperature. The detection rates obtained, shown in Table VII, indicate that detecting people from a mobile platform using thermopile is a harder problem than detecting people in a doorway, since the number of false detections from the moving robot are almost doubled, while the misdetections are about 10 times larger. The associated detection rate of 62.9% can be similar to those of vision-based techniques, and could be improved by adding more thermopile sensors. The resulting solution can be as expensive as a camera-based system, but with the advantage of not requiring special illumination conditions. VI. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK The paper presented an approach for detecting people by measuring the thermal radiation emitted by the body using a

thermopile array. Tests performed at doorways showed that multiple detections and false detections depend mainly on the background noise and little on the way people walk through the doorway. This fact was noticeable under sensor congurations in which the sensor is not pointed in the plane of the doorway. The sensor conguration (d) gave the best results, with detection accuracies of 95.7% comparable to those of commercial systems that can cost 1025 times more. On the other hand, conguration (d) yielded a reasonably small misdetection rate of 3%. When employed on a mobile robot the detection rate was 62.9%, while the misdetections were 10 times higher. This poorer performance is due to the fact that the robot was navigating outdoors, where variations in background temperatures are higher. Despite this difculty, it is to be noted that the main advantage of thermopile sensor is that it is not affected by variations in the environments lighting conditions as camera-based systems. The only drawback of the proposed approach is that when ambient temperature increases and becomes similar to that of the human body it becomes harder to distinguish people from the background. This fact limits the practical application of the sensor to air conditioned buildings or places where the weather does not exceed 3032 C. Integration of thermopiles into mobile robots would provide a simple, yet reliable way to detect the presence of humans, and enable robots to interact in a friendlier way. This type of sensor provides an economically sound alternative to more expensive IR cameras, for such applications as service and rescue robots that may have to interact with humans or nd people. Future work is concerned with the development of an array of sensors to improve the robustness of the system, as well as using a probabilistic approach to lter the measurements and fuse the multiple sensor readings. R EFERENCES
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