Kinethesia toolkit with NI vision Development Module Data Type

[rengas]

I am working on a project where I need to use kinect camera as vision sensor.I already managed to get depth and RGB data from the camera using kinethesia toolkit.Now

I am trying to use NI IMAQ vision to do object detection.I am having trouble converting the data between the kinthesia toolkit and IMAQ. I am not sure how to convert the data between 

kinethesia toolkit VI and IMAQ VI. Where should I start looking for information Data type conversion so that I can use kinethesia VI data to IMAQ  VI as input. Is it even possible to use 

Kinethesia with IMAQ for image processing? Whatelse do I need to know to get the job done? 

Thank you.

[Klemen]

Hello,

I have never used Kinesthesia toolkit, but I suppose it would be as easy as this:

If I am not mistaken, Kinesthesia is primarly used to track the body/joint movement. If you want to do general object/position detection I suggest using the OpenNI/PCL framework. There you can map any 2D image coordinate to the corresponding 3D position.

If you are interested, you can take a look at the link in my signature for more information.

Best regards,

K

[rengas]

HI k,

Thank you for the suggestion and the example. Your blog is very intresting and there are plenty of things to learn.I will try out OpenNI.I am working on a Exoskeleton Robot to help Stroke Patient to  reach objects on the table.So  I need to both track body/joint movment and object detection.I thought of using NI vision to detect objects and kinethesia to track the joint moviements.Am I heading in the right direction? I am experimenting with OpenCV for the object detection part.

What do you think of OpenCV compared to NI Vision?

Regards,
Renga.

[Klemen]

Hello,

one problem I see about this is that if you want to guide the robot to an object in space, you would need its 3D position. As far as I have looked, Kinesthesia can give you 3D joint positions, but not a 3D position of any arbitrary point in space. I suppose that you want to ideally match the 3D coordiantes of the joint/hand to the 3D corrdinates of the object that needs to be picked up?

I have used Kinect to track 2D object and find its corresponding 3D position. This is fairly easy to do with PCL - I used Labview for image processing (and display) and PCL for 3D data processing. The PCL libraries were "integrated" into Labview via a .dll.

I belive the PCL itself has no skeleton/joint tracking functionality, but i've seen some talk about OpenNI to PCL integration... You can try searching for this online.

You could also take a look at the OpenCV implementation for grabbing images (and 3D data) from Kinect: http://docs.opencv.org/doc/user_guide/ug_highgui.html

Regarding OpenCV and Labview, I have used both and both got the job done :). I do not have any preferences, since both have their pros and cons. It's a matter of taste and your project goal - I think OpenCV has more "low-level" functions, where as Labview IMAQ is more end-goal oriented and is based mainly on "high-level" functions. Also, OpenCV uses some GPU functionalities.

Best regards,

K