In this paper, a robot vision technique is presented to detect obstacles, particularly approaching humans, in the images acquired by a mobile robot that autonomously navigates in a narrow building corridor. A single low-cost color camera is attached to the robot, and a trapezoidal area is set as a region of interest (ROI) in front of the robot in the camera image. The lower parts of a human such as feet and legs are first detected in the ROI from their appearances in real time as the distance between the robot and the human becomes smaller. Then, the human detection is confirmed by detecting his/her face within a small search region specified above the part detected in the trapezoidal ROI. To increase the credibility of detection, a final decision about human detection is made when a face is detected in two consecutive image frames. We tested the proposed method using images of various people in corridor scenes, and could get promising results. This method can be used for a vision-guided mobile robot to make a detour for avoiding collision with a human during its indoor navigation.