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kinectpoint-clouds
Arunan
Arunan

Reputation: 3459

Getting a pointcloud using multiple Kinects

I am working on a project where we are going to use multiple Kinects and merge the pointclouds. I would like to know how to use two Kinects at the same time. Are there any specific drivers or embedded application? I used Microsoft SDK but it only supports a single Kinect at a time. But for our project we cannot use multiple PCs. Now I have to find a way to overcome the problem. If someone who has some experience on accessing multiple Kinect drivers, please share your views.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 471

Answers (1)

HenningJ
HenningJ

Reputation: 3149

I assume you are talking about Kinect v2?

Check out libfreenect2. It's an open source driver for Kinect v2 and it supports multiple Kinects on the same computer. But it doesn't provide any of the "advanced" features of the Microsoft SDK like skeleton tracking. But getting the pointcoulds is no problem.

You also need to make sure your hardware supports multiple Kinects. You'll need (most likely) a separate USB3.0 controller for each Kinect. Of course, those controllers need to be Kinect v2 compatible, meaning they need to be Intel or NEC/Renesas chips. That can easily be achieved by using PCIe USB3.0 expansion cards. But those can't be plugged into PCIe x1 slots.

A single lane doesn't have enough bandwidth. x8 or x16 slots usually work.

See Requirements for multiple Kinects@libfreenect2.

And you also need a strong enough CPU and GPU. Depth processing in libfreenect2 is done on the GPU using OpenGL or OpenCL (CPU is possible as well, but very slow). RGB processing is done on the CPU. It needs quite a bit of processing power to give you the raw data.

Upvotes: 3

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