Kinect Hacks

Chapter 6. 3D Object and Scene Reconstruction

Kinect’s ability to accurately recreate the dimensions of any room in real time lends itself to multiple purposes and opens up several new DIY simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) solutions. Having this information converted to a digital wireframe using a Kinect sensor saves a huge amount of time and money. In the past, most people would have to purchase a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) camera, which costs anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000. Now all you need is a Kinect and your choice of a wide variety of 3D scanning software solutions from the free multiplatform RGBDemo to the Windows-only Brekel Kinect to other full environmental mapping tools like RGBDEMO-6D-SLAM.

With a $150 Kinect camera in hand along with a PC and some free software, it’s now possible to accomplish things that would set back professionals using high-end equipment tens of thousands of dollars. We can now easily venture into remote locations without fear of damaging expensive equipment while maintaining a high degree of quality in terms of the 3D scene recreation.

Install RGBDemo and Skanect

RGBDemo is a great open source toolkit written by Nicolas Burrus that allows you to start playing with Kinect data to develop standalone computer vision programs without the hassle of integrating existing libraries. It’s simple in design, it’s easy to use, and it produces great results (see Figure 6-1). It comes with loads of demos that you can use to import mesh files ...