Category: kinect

Skeltrack 0.1.14 released

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The first release of Skeltrack in 2013 is out!

This is also the first version I release without being associated with Igalia but the company agreed that I keep maintaining the project. That’s one of the good aspects of working in Free Software as your daily job: you can continue working on them even if you’re no longer in the company where it was first developed.

This new version is not bloated with new features so “why such a wait?” you might ask. Well, the reason is that there have been a few changes in my life since last year and, more importantly, after I left Igalia, I didn’t have a Kinect and thus, working on Skeltrack was a bit difficult… But finally a few weeks ago I bought one so now I am able to keep hacking.

Faster Tracking

The greatest thing in this release is a big improvement in the performance of Skeltrack when tracking joints. You see, when I originally developed it, I was more concerned with getting it to actually track the skeleton joints than doing it quickly 🙂
Luckily, Iago López (kudos to him) did a neat work in fixing some misuses of GList but more importantly, re-implementing Dijkstra using a priority queue. If you remember your algorithms courses well, with this change you can make Dijkstra go from quadratic to linearithmic time and that’s a BIG improvement.
Here is the difference between the old code and the new expressed in a plot:

Plot comparing Skeltrack's versions

The values used to generate the plot were the time it took skeltrack_skeleton_track_joints_sync to execute. For each of the versions, this function was called 25 times for each of the 550 depth frames and the final values in the plot are the arithmetic average of the results per frame. They were executed in my i5 2.40 GHz laptop without any applications or the desktop running (besides system’s services).
As you can see, there’s a great difference between the speed of the old code and the new. I can’t wait to try Skeltrack on weaker hardware now 😀

(BTW, why 0.1.14 and not 0.1.12? Because of the “release curse” which made me aware of a simple but important bug fix right after pushing 0.1.12…)

Other Things

Besides some small bug fixing in the library, the Skeltrack Kinect example was ported to Clutter 1.12 to keep up with the work done upstream.

Another new thing is that now Skeltrack has a webpage. I recently found out about GitHub’s automatically generated web pages and I thought this would be better than having people visit GitHub’s repo page so there you go: http://joaquimrocha.github.io/Skeltrack/
The page is a bit ugly and minimalist but we’ll improve it.

The documentation can now be found here and bugs can be filed in GitHub as usual.

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.

Going to GUADEC without leaving town

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That’s right, this year GUADEC is taking place in the city I moved to more than 3 years ago in order to become an Igalian: A Coruña. It’s fun to see this event happening just 20 minutes walking from my place when in the previous editions I had to catch several planes in order to attend it 🙂

Going to GUADEC

In this year’s GUADEC, I am presenting two projects I have created:

  • OCRFeeder, the most complete OCR Free Software solution;
  • Skeltrack, the first Free Software library to perform human skeleton tracking from depth buffers such as the ones given by the Kinect.

If this sounds interesting, be sure to attend the talks or have a chat about the projects when you see me.

Since I feel pretty much like a local, I can tell you that you must not leave the town without trying “pulpo á feira” (octopus + olive oil + paprika) or, in case you’re not into cephalopods, just go to some traditional Galician bar, have a beer and enjoy the folk music of Celtic origins.