Book Image

Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide

By : Abhijit Jana
Book Image

Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide

By: Abhijit Jana

Overview of this book

Kinect has been a game-changer in the world of motion games and applications since its first release. It has been touted as a controller for Microsoft Xbox but is much more than that. The developer version of Kinect, Kinect for Windows SDK, provides developers with the tools to develop applications that run on Windows. You can use this to develop applications that make interaction with your computer hands-free. This book focuses on developing applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK. It is a complete end to end solution using different features of Kinect for Windows SDK with step by step guidance. The book will also help you develop motion sensitive and speech recognition enabled applications. You will also learn about building application using multiple Kinects.The book begins with explaining the different components of Kinect and then moves into to the setting up the device and getting thedevelopment environment ready. You will be surprised at how quickly the book takes you through the details of Kinect APIs. You will use NUI to use the Kinect for Natural Inputs like skeleton tracking, sensing, speech recognizing. You will capture different types of stream, and images, handle stream event, and capture frame. Kinect device contains a motorized tilt to control sensor angles, you will learn how to adjust it automatically. The last part of the book teaches you how to build application using multiple Kinects and discuss how Kinect can be used to integrate with other devices such as Windows Phone and microcontroller.

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Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide
Abhijit Jana
Dec, 2012 | 392 pages
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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide
Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Understanding the Kinect Device
Understanding the Kinect Device
Components of Kinect for Windows
Kinect for Windows versus Kinect for Xbox
Where can you use Kinect
Summary
2
Getting Started
Getting Started
System requirements for the Kinect for Windows SDK
Evaluation of the Kinect for Windows SDK
Downloading the SDK and the Developer Toolkit
Installing Kinect for Windows SDK
Testing your device
Looking inside the Kinect SDK
Features of the Kinect for Windows SDK
The Kinect for Windows Developer Toolkit
Making your development setup ready
The Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit
Summary
3
Starting to Build Kinect Applications
Starting to Build Kinect Applications
How applications interact with the Kinect sensor
Kinect Info Box – your first Kinect application
Dealing with the Kinect status
Summary
4
Getting the Most out of Kinect Camera
Getting the Most out of Kinect Camera
Understanding the Kinect image stream
Different ways of retrieving the color stream from Kinect
KinectCam – a Kinect camera application
Enabling the color stream channel
Looking inside color image stream helpers
Capturing frames on demand
Extending the KinectCam
Applying more effects to the camera
Seeing in low light
Making your application perform better
Using the Coding4Fun toolkit
Summary
5
The Depth Data – Making Things Happen
The Depth Data – Making Things Happen
Understanding the depth data stream
Capturing and processing depth data
Looking inside depth image stream helpers
Depth data and distance
Working with depth range
Depth data distribution
Player index with depth data
Getting the depth and player index automatically
A 3D view of depth data
Summary
6
Human Skeleton Tracking
Human Skeleton Tracking
How skeleton tracking works
Skeleton tracking with the Kinect SDK
Start tracking skeleton joints
Flow – capturing skeleton data
An intrusion detector camera application
Looking inside skeleton stream helpers
Skeleton-tracking mode
Skeleton tracking in near mode
The Skeleton
Choosing which skeleton to track
The building blocks – Joints and JointCollection
Steps to be followed for joint tracking
Create your own joints data point
Bones – connecting joints
Adjusting the Kinect sensor automatically and giving live feedback to users
Skeleton smoothing – soften the skeleton's movement
Skeleton space transformation
The Advanced Skeleton Viewer application
Debugging the applications
Getting data frames together
Summary
7
Using Kinect's Microphone Array
Using Kinect's Microphone Array
Verifying the Kinect audio configuration
Using the Kinect microphone array with your computer
The Kinect SDK architecture for Audio
Kinect microphone array
Audio signal processing in Kinect
Taking control over the microphone array
Kinect sound recorder – capturing Kinect audio data
Processing the audio data
Sound source localization
Summary
8
Speech Recognition
Speech Recognition
How speech recognition works
Using Kinect with your Windows PC speech recognition
Beginning with Microsoft Speech API (SAPI)
Draw What I Want – a speech-enabled application
Summary
9
Building Gesture-controlled Applications
Building Gesture-controlled Applications
What is a gesture
Approaches for gesture recognition
Basic gesture recognition
Algorithmic gesture recognition
Weighted network gesture recognition
Template-based gesture recognition
Building gesture-enabled controls
The Basic Interaction – a WPF application
Key things to remember
Summary
10
Developing Applications Using Multiple Kinects
Developing Applications Using Multiple Kinects
Setting up the environment for multiple Kinects
Multiple Kinects – how to reduce interference
Detecting multiple Kinects
Developing an application with multiple Kinects
Controlling multiple sensor status changes
Handling a failover scenario using Kinects
Challenges faced in developing applications using multiple Kinects
Applications where multiple Kinects can be used
Summary
11
Putting Things Together
Putting Things Together
Taking Kinect to the Cloud
Remotely using the Kinect with Windows Phone
Using Kinect with a Netduino microcontroller
Augmented reality applications
Working with face tracking
Working with XNA and a 3D avatar
Summary
Index
Index

About the Reviewers

Atul Gupta is currently a Principal Technology Architect at Infosys' Microsoft Technology Center, Infosys Labs. With more than 16 years of experience working on Microsoft technologies, his expertise spans User Interface technologies, and he currently works on touch and gestural interfaces with technologies such as Windows 8 and Kinect. He has prior experience on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, Windows 7, Deepzoom, Pivot, PixelSense, and Windows Phone 7.

He has co-authored the book ASP.NET 4 Social Networking, Packt Publishing. Earlier in his career, he has also worked on technologies such as COM, DCOM, C, VC++, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, AJAX, and ASP.NET MVC. He is a regular reviewer for Packt Publishing and has reviewed books on topics such as Silverlight and Generics.

He has authored papers for industry publications and websites, some of which are available on Infosys' Technology Showcase (http://www.infosys.com/microsoft/resource-center/pages/technology-showcase.aspx). Along with his colleagues from Infosys, he is also an active blogger (http://www.infosysblogs.com/microsoft). Being actively involved in professional Microsoft online communities and developer forums, he has received Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional award for multiple years in a row.

Anoop Madhusudanan has been a Microsoft MVP in C# for the last 3 years and has more than 10 years of experience with Microsoft technologies. Presently, he is working as a Solution Architect with the Cloud & Mobile Center of Excellence, Marlabs Inc. He works across multiple Microsoft technologies and platforms including Windows 8, ASP.NET, Windows Azure, and so on, across domains including education, healthcare, and telecom.

He blogs at http://amazedsaint.com and is the developer of various open source frameworks such as BrainNet Neural Network Library, ElasticObject, SilverDraw, MetaCoder, and so on. He is also an active contributor to CodeProject. His Twitter handle is @amazedsaint.

Atul Verma is a Technical Consultant at Microsoft Services Global Delivery and is a graduate from NIT, Hamirpur. He has been developing enterprise-level secure and scalable solutions using agile software methodologies for the past seven years. His technical expertise includes WPF, ASP.NET, WCF, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and Kinect for Windows. Apart from this, he also contributes to technical communities, technical seminars, open source projects, and blogs. He is currently studying the essence of Indian culture and loves to spend quality time with his family. You can follow him on Twitter at @verma_atul.

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