Event details

Skeltrack: A Free Software library for skeleton tracking

von Joaquim Rocha (Igalia)

Saturday, 26.05.2012, Europa II, 10:45-11:30 Uhr

With the release of the Kinect device, there was finally an affordable camera capable of giving depth information. This, together with the Kinect's open USB connection, led to a lot of innovative projects.

Still, the Kinect just gives raw signals and the only way to obtain more complex information, such as skeleton tracking was to use either the Microsoft SDK or the OpenNI framework. Both of these solutions are closed, proprietary and, in the case of Microsoft's, only for non-commercial work.

To solve the issue above, Igalia developed Skeltrack, a Free and Open Source library published under LGPL that performs human skeleton tracking and identifies a number of skeleton joints. It is a more atomic solution than the other commercial counterparts because it does not connect directly to the Kinect nor to any other depth camera, instead it expects to be given the buffer corresponding to the depth buffer.

In this talk I will present how Skeltrack was developed and show a demo of it working.

Über den Autor Joaquim Rocha:

Joaquim Rocha holds a MsSc in Computer Science Enginner from the University of Évora. He has been involved in the organization of events related to Free and Open Source Software and several projects that go from web development to desktop and mobile applications and also Optical Character Recognition.

Regarding mobile devices, Joaquim has created projects like BluePad (PC remote control in J2ME), the port of the Eye of GNOME for Maemo and also SeriesFinale, a TV shows' tracker application for Maemo 5. He has also been involved in Optical Character Recognition and Document Analysis. Within this area he developed OCRFeeder, an application for his Master's Thesis which converts a printed document into an OpenDocument Text one. Mixing pleasure with work, he is part of Igalia's mobile and desktop team and is currently exploring the possibilities of Free Software in fields like computer vision.