1 © Bram van der Vlist, 2005 H UMAN B ODY D ETECTI ON M ETHODS A literature review Supervisors: Jos van den Heuvel and Matthias Rauterberg May/June 2005 Bram van der Vlist (student) Department of Industrial Design Technical University Eindhoven (The Netherlands) 1. I NTRODUCTI ON The problem my Individual Bachelor project addresses is the risk of getting injured by a running boat propeller. In order to solve this safety problem I am investigating possibilities to detect humans which are close to the propeller and make a system perform a certain action to prevent injury. The reason for this literature review is to assess if there are any human body detection methods available which could be used to detect the presence of human beings in above and underwater situations. The situation is a very complex one, a constantly changing environment and passing objects with quite high speeds (top speeds up to 90 km/h approx). 2. SEARCH QUESTI ONS, STRATEGY AND DATABASE CHOI CE A literature search is done in the digital databases Compendex and Inspec. The following search question(s) was used: (Object recognition OR object detection OR target tracking) AND (Human body OR human bodies OR person* OR people OR marine animal* ) Restrictions for underwater situations are left out because these search parameters did not achieve the desired results. The building block strategy was used, searching for part 1 and 2 of the search question and combine with AND. The results were filtered using exclusions of face and facial recognition, person identification, static situations and static images using the NOT operator. After scanning the search results, the most relevant references were selected. From the abstracts the articles were categorised in the following categories: Pedestrian detection Human body detection in backgrounds Victim detection Human posture detection/recognition (Other) Human body detection methods