An object detector, an object detecting method and a robot can reduce
diction errors of detecting wrong objects without increasing the volume
of the computational operation to be performed to detect the right
object. A face detector 101 comprises a face detecting section 110 that
operates like a conventional face detecting section and is adapted to
roughly select face candidates from an input image by template matching
and detect face candidates by means of a support vector machine for face
recognition, a non-face judging section 120 that detects non-face
candidates that are judged to be non-faces and removes them from the face
candidates selected by the face detecting section 110 and a skin tracker
section 114 for tracking a face region after the non-face judgment. When
the assumed distance between the face detector and the face as computed
from the input image and the measured distance as measured by a distance
sensor show a large difference, when the color variance of the face
candidate is small, when the occupancy ratio of the skin color region is
large and when the change in the size of the face region is large after
the elapse of a predetermined time, the non-face judging section 120
judges such face candidates as non-faces and removes them from the face
candidates.