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Right now the Kinect drivers can't do anything that a pair of cheap USB webcams can't. The only advantage seems to be the on-board depth processing instead of h

Right now the Kinect drivers can't do anything that a pair of cheap USB webcams can't. The only advantage seems to be the on-board depth processing instead of having to use something like OpenCV. http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/ http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

catch23 16y ago
Yeah, but it does make it easier and more accessible to those who don't hack with OpenCV every day. One could also argue that one can always build digital components from scratch instead of using something like an Arduino.
dimatura 16y ago
A pair of cheap usb webcams are pretty suboptimal for stereo vision. To start, they aren't synchronized. Plus you have to rig them somehow to know their relative positions. They may use rolling shutter, which is bad for stereo. It's not that it can't be done, but it's not easy.
greendestiny 16y ago
It's a cheap and off-the-shelf colour and depth capturing from IR structured light. That's nothing to scoff at. A pair of cheap webcams only gets you trying to do real-time depth processing from passive stereo and thats not easy.
aperiodic 16y ago
Yeah, but one of these things I can buy at the store, go home, and an hour later be doing cool stuff with.
modeless 16y ago
Completely wrong. Kinect is not a stereo vision system. It's the first consumer application of a completely new class of cameras which directly measures depth by the time of flight of a reflected laser beam. It's literally a 320x240 array of laser rangefinders. It's called a flash LIDAR camera, and the quality and robustness of the depth data is far beyond anything achievable from stereo vision today even with high-end cameras, let alone webcams. edit: Actually, there seems to be some confusion on the Internet about exactly how Kinect's depth sensor works, and it may be more likely based on structured light scanning than LIDAR (though Microsoft has recently acquired some LIDAR startups). Either way, though, the depth data quality is far beyond any kind of stereo vision.
- teamonkey 16y ago
  From what I understand, an IR pattern is projected on to the room and the cameras pick it up. The level of distortion in the pattern shows how far the object is. NOT Lidar. Probably a laser projector though. The tech is nice, and it's nice that it's bundled up in one affordable package, but the real power in Kinect is in the software. Right now all that the drivers return is raw video and depth. It's what you do with that data that counts.

catch23 16y ago

Yeah, but it does make it easier and more accessible to those who don't hack with OpenCV every day. One could also argue that one can always build digital components from scratch instead of using something like an Arduino.

dimatura 16y ago

A pair of cheap usb webcams are pretty suboptimal for stereo vision. To start, they aren't synchronized. Plus you have to rig them somehow to know their relative positions. They may use rolling shutter, which is bad for stereo. It's not that it can't be done, but it's not easy.

greendestiny 16y ago

It's a cheap and off-the-shelf colour and depth capturing from IR structured light. That's nothing to scoff at. A pair of cheap webcams only gets you trying to do real-time depth processing from passive stereo and thats not easy.

aperiodic 16y ago

Yeah, but one of these things I can buy at the store, go home, and an hour later be doing cool stuff with.

modeless 16y ago

Completely wrong. Kinect is not a stereo vision system. It's the first consumer application of a completely new class of cameras which directly measures depth by the time of flight of a reflected laser beam. It's literally a 320x240 array of laser rangefinders. It's called a flash LIDAR camera, and the quality and robustness of the depth data is far beyond anything achievable from stereo vision today even with high-end cameras, let alone webcams. edit: Actually, there seems to be some confusion on the Internet about exactly how Kinect's depth sensor works, and it may be more likely based on structured light scanning than LIDAR (though Microsoft has recently acquired some LIDAR startups). Either way, though, the depth data quality is far beyond any kind of stereo vision.

teamonkey 16y ago
From what I understand, an IR pattern is projected on to the room and the cameras pick it up. The level of distortion in the pattern shows how far the object is. NOT Lidar. Probably a laser projector though. The tech is nice, and it's nice that it's bundled up in one affordable package, but the real power in Kinect is in the software. Right now all that the drivers return is raw video and depth. It's what you do with that data that counts.