Kinect Library for Skeletal Tracking

Question

I'm embarking on a project to do an electronic boxing trainier, designed to help beginners learn the basic building blocks of boxing and also give people an opportunity to shadow box and for it to pick out their faults.

I need to do the project now and so am planning on using the Kinect because it seems the Skeleton tracking is fairly easy and well documented (unless anyone has better suggestions) I can't wait for the new Kinect hardware so I'm using the old one which will be cheap and cheerful. Plus it widens the scope for younger children and teenagers to use this as much as possible.

The downside to this is there seems to be a multitude of libraries (Microsoft Kinect, Open Kinect, OpenNI, openframeworks etc..) and I'm struggling to get my head around which one would be best for my use. I will need to detect and calculate joint angles to tell if someone is throwing a punch properly as well as ideally depth and side-on skeleton tracking. I know these bring their own extra challenges and that I might well need to use two in conjunction with each other.

What library should I use!?

Answer 1

I would recommend the Microsoft Kinect SDK (most recent is 1.8), as it is the official SDK for Kinect, and has many different functions for interfacing with skeletons. However, I have to admit I have a bias as I have never used OpenNI or Open Kinect. You could try to use the Kinect SDK OpenNI bridge if you really wanted both, however that link does require version 1.5.

It is just simple math to calculate the angle between the joints, so your issue requires more thought as to what you are trying to accomplish otherwise and what you will need for that. See Official Kinect SDK vs. Open-source alternatives describing the differences between the SDK and OpenNI.