Chapter 4. Getting the Most out of Kinect Camera
You are all set to take your development experience to the next level. This time you will leverage your learning towards the Kinect SDK API by accessing the Kinect camera and playing around with the data captured by the camera. The Kinect device has a video camera that delivers the three basic color components, namely red, green, and blue. As part of the Kinect sensor, the camera helps in capturing the color stream, enabling face tracking and more. This color stream is the least complex process in terms of the way it returns the data and how the SDK processes it. Working with a Kinect image stream majorly involves the following steps:
- Enabling the stream.
- Capturing the stream frame by frame in the application.
- Processing the image frames.
In this chapter, you will learn how to enable and retrieve the color stream, extract frames, play around with the color pixels, control the device motor, and apply effects on camera images. We will start with building a camera application that uses the Kinect color camera, and then we will be extending the camera with various features, such as extracting frames, saving frames, changing pixels formats and others. You will also learn how to change the camera's color brightness, contrasts, hue, and other different settings to fine-tune color images, along with applying backlight compensation. The following is an overview of the various aspects that we'll be covering in this chapter:
- Understanding the Kinect image stream
- Understanding different ways of retrieving stream data
- Building a KinectCam application that uses the Kinect camera
- Studying Kinect APIs in depth for color image streams
- Manipulating individual color pixels
- Changing the sensor elevation angle
- Applying effects on the Kinect camera
- Making your camera see in low light conditions
- Improving the performance of your application