Joaquim Rocha
Published on

Skeltrack 0.1.8 released

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Joaquim Rocha
    Twitter
  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

Skeltrack, the Open Source library for skeleton tracking, keeps being improved here in Igalia and today we are releasing version 0.1.8. Since July we have had the valuable extra help of Iago López who is doing an internship in Igalia’s Interactivity Team.

What’s new

Several bug fixes (including the introspection), both in the library and the supplied example were fixed. The threading model was simplified and the skeleton tracking implementation was divided in several files for a better organized source code.

While the above is nice, the coolest thing about this release (and kudos to Iago for this) is that it makes Skeltrack work better with scenes where the user is not completely alone. The issue was that if there was another person or object (think chairs, tables, etc. for a real life example) was in the scene they would confuse the skeleton tracking. After this version, while not being perfect (objects/people cannot be touching the user), the algorithm will try to discard objects that are not the user. But what about having two people in a scene, which one will it choose? To control this, we have introduced a new function:

skeltrack_skeleton_set_focus_point (SkeltrackSkeleton *skeleton, gint x, gint y, gint z)

This function will tell Skeltrack to focus on the user closer to this point, thus allowing to focus on a user in real time by constantly changing this point to, for example, the user’s head position. So, even if there is no multi-user support, the current API makes it easy to just run other instances of Skeltrack and try to pick users from other points in the scene. It should also be easier to use Skeltrack for a typical installation where there is a user controlling something in a public space while other people are passing or standing by.

Contribute

We will keep betting on this great library. If you wanna help us, read the docs, check out Skeltrack’s GitHub and send us patches or open issues.