looking for kinect substitute

[Sebastien Chevriau]

Hi,
Due to Kinect end of life I am looking for a substitute.
The two main active products seem to be the Intel Realsense and the Orbbec Astra.
Do you have any feedback with these products ?
The SDK of these product doesn't seem to provide skeleton detection. It should be coupled to another SDK as NUITrack or other. Any feedback about this part ?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,

Sébastien Chevriau
Research Engineer in Virtual Reality
Mobility and Transport of the Future
Innovation Crunch Lab | http://openlab.utbm.fr/
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[Alexandre Avenel]

Hi Sébastien,

For skeleton detection, you can have a look at OpenPose (https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing-Lab/openpose)

It's not really the same thing as kinect SDK, but could be a valid replacement in some cases.

Regards,

Alexandre Avenel

[Lorne Covington]

Concerning depth cameras, here's my current survey:

There appears to be a new Kinect in the pipeline, "Project Kinect for Azure", aka Kinect v4, and its performance looks amazing.  There have been a couple of surveys on desired features, and body segmentation has placed highly.  You can download a recent whitepaper on it, and there is a notice mailing list.  Have not heard any timeline though, I expect it is at least a year away.

The Orbbec is a nice camera, basically a better Primesense/XTion1.  It has on OpenNI2 API, so it dropped right into my software.  The Persee has its own processor, so it can do pre-processing and send data over a network connection.  There is an article about doing body tracking with it and NUITrack, but I have not tried it.

Another interesting device is the VicoVR, which does skeleton tracking and sends it over WiFi, a very compact solution.  I got one off Kickstarter but have never had time to check it out.

I am using a lot of StereoLabs ZEDs in a large interactive art installation in NYC, since they are stereo vision and work in sunlight.  They require a pretty good nVidia CUDA capable graphics card though, which adds to their cost and system complexity.  But in the right conditions they can approach a Kinect v2 in depth quality.

If you have not checked the Intel RealSense cams in a while, you should.  The DS435 is an excellent, small, USB-powered camera that does the depth processing internally so it has low system demand.  It uses stereo vision, but in the infrared, and it has its own built-in speckle illuminator so it can work in darkness to direct sunlight.  The speckle also really improves the depth quality indoors.

But I have to admit, when the Kinect v2 went out of production, I went and bought a pantload of them at the local GameStop; lots and lots of gamers that got one with their XBox turned them in, so used ones are only $40 here in the US.  With the simple power mod, they do not need the interface box and can directly plug into USB3.  I still use them a lot - the quality of their pointcloud allows me to combine multiple cameras with high accuracy.  And with LibFreenect2, you can use them with OpenNI2 applications.

So, did I miss anything new?  Sorry can't help with the skeleton tracking more, but I rolled my own simpler version in order to get device and SDK independence.

Good luck, share what you find out!

- Lorne

Lorne Covington
NOIRFLUX - Art in Interaction
http://noirflux.com

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