Gestures and Tools for Kinect and matching Toolkit too

There's not much more I can say about this post and toolkit. In short, if you're looking for gesture support for your Kinect app, or are interested in seeing the magic behind recognizing gestures, this post and project was built just for you.

Gestures and Tools for Kinect & the Kinect Toolkit

For now, however, no gestures recognition services are available. So throughout this paper we will create our own library that will automatically detect simple movements such as swipe but also movements more complex such as drawing a circle with your hand.

The detection of such gestures enable Powerpoint control the Jedi way ! (similar to the Kinect Keyboard Simulator demo).

If you are not familiar with the Kinect for Windows SDK, you should read a previous post that addressed the topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eternalcoding/archive/2011/06/13/unleash-the-power-of-kinect-for-windows-sdk.aspx

How to detect gestures ?

There is an infinite number of solutions for detecting a gesture. In this article I will explorer two of them:

• Algorithmic search
• Template based search

Note that these two techniques have many variants and refinements.

Kinect Toolkit is a set of useful tools for developing with Kinect for Windows SDK. It includes helpers for gestures, postures, replay and drawing.

Gestures

• SwipeGestureDetectorcan detect the following gestures
  1. SwipeToLeft
  2. SwipeToRight
• TemplateGestureDetector can record gestures in a learning machine and detect them later. Using this class, you can detect every kind of 2D gestures (letters, geometric shapes such as circle...)

Postures

• PostureDetectorcan detect the following postures:
  1. None
  2. HandsJoined
  3. LeftHandOverHead
  4. RightHandOverHead
  5. LeftHello
  6. RightHello

Skeleton Stability

• BarycenterHelper can indicate if a skeleton is static or is moving. This allows you to determine if you can launch gestures detection or not.

Drawing

• SkeletonDisplayManager allows you to draw a skeleton frame on top of a WPF canvas:
• GestureDetectors can draw recorded positions on top of a WPF canvas

Project Information URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eternalcoding/archive/2011/07/04/gestures-and-tools-for-kinect.aspx & http://kinecttoolkit.codeplex.com/

Project Download URL: http://kinecttoolkit.codeplex.com/releases/view/70108

Project Source URL: http://kinecttoolkit.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets

Contact Information:

• Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eternalcoding 
• Twitter: @deltakosh