Kinect with OpenCV using Freenect

I recently got a Kinect to work on at my sumemr internship at Ducere Technologies. Having heard so much about OpenNI, I tried installing it on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64 bit machine. It took some time to configure, build and install it. I got help from few blogs. I managed to install it somehow. Connected the kinect and fired up the demo program and ran into troubles. I was getting following error.

A timeout has occurred while waiting for new data

I rebuilt OpenCV with OpenNI support but was facing the same problem. I spent a lot of time looking for it but couldn’t find anything substantial. I removed and blacklisted the default kinect driver from the kernel, but the problem persisted. I was trying few things and somehow it worked for a moment. OpenCV grabbed the image and then again ran into same errors. I was fed up so I tried using kinect with SimpleCV. SimpleCV uses python bindings of freenect which I installed using apt-get.

sudo apt-get install libfreenect-dev freenect python-freenect

I wrote a qucik three line code in SimpleCV shell.

k = Kinect()
k.getImage().show()
Image(k.getDepthMatrix(), cv2image=True).show()

And it worked. Here’s a demo video that I made using SimpleCV.

Here’s the code.

    from SimpleCV import *

    k = Kinect()
    while True:
        try:
            img = k.getImage()
            depth = Image(k.getDepthMatrix(), cv2image=True)
            img.sideBySide(depth).show()
            time.sleep(0.2)
        except KeyboardInterrupt:
            break

This was really positive and motivated me to use freenect with OpenCV. I looked it up on Google and found few links.

The above code is written for iplImage, so I made few changes so that it supports the current C++ API. You can find it here. This code uses OpenCV Mat structure and all the latest C++ API. As of now, I don’t have much knowledege of threading, but I’ll dig it up and try to improve this code if there’s any scope.

I don’t have any video of OpenCV with freenect. But I’ll upload it first thing in the next week.

P.S. Google Summer of Code 2013.

Playing around with Android UI

Articles focusing on Android UI - playing around with ViewPagers, CoordinatorLayout, meaningful motions and animations, implementing difficult customized views, etc.

Read next

I'm Building Taskito

Playing around with Android UI