Ever since its inception, Kinect has brought about a revolution in the field of NUI and hands-free gaming. There is no wonder that Kinect went on to shatter all records and become the fastest selling electronic device on earth. Although touted as a controller for Xbox console, Kinect applicability is beyond gaming domain and you can think of building applications for diverse domains such as health care, robotics, imaging, education, security, and so on. Thus we have the Kinect for Windows sensor, that enables applications to interacts with users via gestures and voice, and this opens up avenues that developers couldn't even have imagined before.
This book is mainly focussed on the Kinect for Windows SDK with which you can build applications that can leverage the power of the Kinect sensor. This book doesn't require any prior knowledge about the platform from the reader and its strength is the simplicity in which the concepts have been presented using code snippets, a step-by-step process, and detailed descriptions. This book covers:
A practical step-by-step tutorial to make learning easy for a beginner
A detailed discussion of all the APIs involved and the explanations of their usage in detail
Procedures for developing motion-sensing applications and also methods used to enable speech recognition
Chapter 1, Understanding the Kinect Device, introduces Kinect as a hardware device. You will get an insight into the different components that make up Kinect and the technology behind this device, which makes the components work together. This chapter will also give an overview of the difference between Kinect for Xbox and Kinect for Windows sensor. You will also become familiar with different possibilities of domain specific applications that can be developed using the Kinect sensor.
Chapter 2, Getting Started, introduces the Kinect for Windows SDK, its features, and how to start working with the Kinect sensor. In this chapter, you will get to know about the requirements for preparing your development environment. This will also walk you through a step-by-step guide for downloading and installing the SDK. You will delve into the installed components to verify that everything is set up properly. This chapter will also provide you with a quick lap around the different features of the Kinect for Windows SDK as well as introduce the Kinect for Windows Developer Toolkit.
Chapter 3, Starting to Build Kinect Applications, explains the step-by-step process of building your first Kinect-based application. You will understand how applications interact with the Kinect sensor using the SDK libraries. This chapter will give you an in-depth guide on how to start building Kinect applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK and Visual Studio. You will also learn how to deal with applications when there is any change in the device status.
Chapter 4, Getting the Most Out of Kinect Camera, covers the in-depth discussion of the Kinect color camera and how to use it. In this chapter, you will learn about the different types of image streams and different approaches to retrieve them from the Kinect sensor. You will get an understanding of Color camera stream pipeline and its events. You will also explore the different features of the Kinect for Windows SDK that control the color camera and process the color data. This chapter will give you an understanding of processing color images and applying different effects to the captured images and how to save the image frames. You will also learn how you can use the Kinect camera to capture images in low light.
Chapter 5, The Depth Data – Making Things Happen, explores the fundamentals of the Kinect depth sensors and how they produce depth information. This chapter describes how to work with object distances and player indices from the captured depth data. You will also learn about the capturing of data using the near mode and also get a quick view of generating 3D depth data.
Chapter 6, Human Skeleton Tracking, describes how a Kinect sensor tracks the human skeleton and how you can leverage the features of the Kinect for Windows SDK to play around with tracked skeletons and joints. You will also learn how to change the sensor elevation angle based on the player position. This chapter also explores how skeletons can be tracked in a seated mode. You also learn about details of the skeleton joints and bone hierarchy. The sample application in this chapter will help you to understand the APIs for skeleton tracking in better ways such as using Kinect as an intrusion detector. At the end of this chapter, you will be familiar with a few debugging tips and tricks to boost your development speed.
Chapter 7, Using Kinect's Microphone Array, introduces the microphone array that captures and processes the audio signal. You will learn why Kinect uses an array of microphones rather than a single microphone. In this chapter you will get an insight into the Kinect audio processing pipeline that helps Kinect to capture good-quality audio signals and makes Kinect a highly directional audio device. This chapter provides you with information on how to capture and record audio signals using the Kinect microphone array and process the audio data for better quality. You will also learn about different concepts such as Noise Suppression, Automatic Gain Control, Echo Cancellation, and Beam forming.
Chapter 8, Speech Recognition, introduces the building of speech-enabled applications using Kinect. You will explore how speech recognition works and how Kinect's microphone array helps Kinect to recognize human speech. This chapter also shows how you can use Kinect as the default speech recognition device for your PC. You will also learn about the Microsoft Speech API and how it is integrated with Kinect for Windows SDK, which helps us to build speech-enabled applications.
Chapter 9, Building Gesture-controlled Applications, describes how to build applications that can be controlled by human gestures. You will learn different approaches for recognizing gestures and how to apply these approaches in the form of programs to build motion-sensing applications using the Kinect sensor. This chapter will also help you understand how to build some gestured-enabled controls.
Chapter 10, Developing Applications Using Multiple Kinects, explains how multiple Kinect sensors can be placed together and used to build applications. This chapter describes how to set up environments for developing applications using multiple Kinects and walks you through building applications by reading data from multiple devices. You also learn how multiple Kinects work together and different scenarios where multiple Kinects can be used, along with the challenges while developing applications using multiple devices.
Chapter 11, Putting Things Together, introduces us to more advanced developments using Kinect by integrating it with other devices such as Windows Phone, microcontrollers, and so on. This chapter addresses how we can take things up from Kinect to Windows Azure and control the Kinect sensor using Windows Phone via Windows Azure. You will also learn how Kinect can be integrated with the Netduino microcontroller and how you can use a Kinect device for face tracking.
The basic requirements for this book are as follows:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express or higher editions of Visual Studio
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 or higher
Kinect for Windows Sensor or Kinect for Xbox Sensor
Kinect for Windows SDK
Please refer Chapter 02, Getting Started , for detailed information on installation of SDK and the development environment setup.
The purpose of this book is to explain how to develop applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK. If you are a beginner and looking to start developing applications using the Kinect for Windows SDK, and if you want to build motion-sensing, speech-recognizing applications with Kinect, this book is for you.
This book uses C# and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) in the examples, so you need to know the basics of C# and WPF. You should be familiar with the Visual Studio IDE as well. You don't have to know anything about the Kinect for Windows SDK.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Each Kinect device represents an instance of the Microsoft.Kinect.KinectSensor class."
A block of code is set as follows:
public sealed class KinectSensorCollection : ReadOnlyCollection<KinectSensor>
{
public KinectSensor this[string instanceId] { get; }
public event EventHandler<StatusChangedEventArgs> StatusChanged;
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
public partial class MainWindow : Window
{
KinectSensor sensor;
// remaining code goes here
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Move to the Listen tab and select the Listen to this device checkbox and click on Apply".
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