OpenCV 4 with Python Blueprints - Second Edition

Accessing the Kinect 3D sensor

The easiest way to access a Kinect sensor is by using an OpenKinect module called freenect. For installation instructions, take a look at the preceding section.

The freenect module has functions such as sync_get_depth() and sync_get_video(), used to obtain images synchronously from the depth sensor and camera sensor respectively. For this chapter, we will need only the Kinect depth map, which is a single-channel (grayscale) image in which each pixel value is the estimated distance from the camera to a particular surface in the visual scene.

Here, we will design a function that will read a frame from the sensor and convert it to the desired format, and return the frame together with a success status, as follows: ...