Category: computer vision

Playing Angry Birds with a Kinect

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Recently I had to use OpenCV in a project inside the Igalia Interactivity and I took the chance to code a little demo I had in my mind for a while: play Angry Birds with a Kinect and using only Free Software.

Here’s the result:


(direct link to video in Vimeo)

How it’s done

The demo uses Skeltrack (the only Free Software skeleton tracking library) to get user’s hands’ positions. The picked hand’s position will be used to move the mouse pointer. This part is the same that is used in the Skeltrack Desktop Control demo.
Once the hand’s position is known, I calculate an area around its point in the original depth image given by GFreenect and then use OpenCV to get the hand’s contours and their convexity defects. An open hand palm will produce very distinguished convexity defects and by counting them I assume the user’s hand palm is open. After this, all that is missing is to tie a detected closed palm to a mouse press and an open palm to a mouse release.

As the video shows, the demo is not polished yet but it shows one of the many possibilities that allying Skeltrack with other computer vision software gives us.

Skeltrack 0.1.10 is out

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That’s right, a new version of the world’s first Free Software skeleton tracking library is out.
In every version we try to make Skeltrack more robust and this one is no exception.

Head&Shoulders

We have changed the way the shoulders are inferred. This heuristic now uses a circumference around the user’s head and an arc with which it searches for the shoulders.
Since we like to keep giving developers the ability to tweak the algorithm’s parameters, we had to change the properties related to the shoulders. We should probably improve the documentation with a visual explanation of how those properties work but meanwhile you can check the properties’ documentation.

Centering Joints

Another issue we had was that the extremas we initially calculate result in e.g. the point at tip of the a finger (for a hand joint) or the top of the head. This was not an issue specifically but it might result in more unstable joints. For example, the Kinect device in particular might give blind spots in very bushy hair which would result in the head joint jittering more than usual.
To fix this, we calculate the average of points around an extrema and assign it with that value. The radius of the sphere surrounding an extrema that is used to calculate this average can be controlled by using the extrema-sphere-radius property. Thus, if this behavior is not desired, this feature can be turned off just by simply assigning a 0 to this property.

Here is a couple of pictures describing this issue:

Picture of Skeltrack's test without averaged extremas
Without the averaged extremas (extrema-sphere-radius set to 0)
Picture of Skeltrack's test with averaged extremas
With the averaged extremas (extrema-sphere-radius set to 300)

Vertical Kinect

Due to a project that Igalia Interactivity has been working on, we had to use the Kinect in a vertical stance. By doing this we discovered a small bug that prevented Skeltrack to be used with a vertical depth image. This is corrected in this 0.1.10 version and while fixing it, we found out that it seems the other skeleton tracking alternatives also do not support the Kinect in a vertical stance; this might mean that if you want to use skeleton tracking with the Kinect vertically, your only choice is either to use Skeltrack or to convince Microsoft or PrimeSense to fix their solutions for you 🙂

Picture of Skeltrack's test example using a Kinect in a vertical stance
Skeltrack using a Kinect in a vertical stance

Last but not least, the function skeltrack_skeleton_new was returning a GObject instance by mistake. We have corrected that and it now returns a pointer to SkeltrackSkeleton as expected.

Special thanks to Iago, our intern at the Igalia Interactivity team, for coding most of these nifty features.

Be sure to clone Skeltrack at GitHub and read the docs, you are welcome to participate in its development.

Skeltrack 0.1.8 released

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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.