Work in progress: Vision system I

This post is going to be slightly larger than my previous ones, since I haven't posted anything for a while now. Mainly I will cover Computer Vision related aspects, since that is something I have mainly worked on.

The idea we had for the project (initially), was to track smoke rings, suing the Kinect and OpenCV. The whole point of this was to project on them, without having a static location where we project. The main advantage the Kinect offers is depth recognition.

So far, so good.

Since I am using Ubuntu Linux, I managed to install the openKinect and freenect libraries on my machine, since the official SDK is available only on Microsoft Windows.

On the left you can see the depth representation from the Kinect camera. We encountered that while trying to shoot smoke rings, they would not get recognized as altering the depth of the image. Because of this problem, we decided to drop the Kinect but also to stop trying to recognize the smoke rings.

Instead, we started looking at how to recognize hand gestures solely in OpenCV.

In the next posts I will describe the techniques we used to build a reliable system.