Microsofts research project KinectFusion investigates techniques to track the 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) position of handheld depth sensing cameras, such as Kinect, as they move through space and perform high quality 3D surface reconstructions for interaction. The technique is shown on the KinectFusion demo video on Youtube.
Two research papers, co-authored by more than 10 researchers across Microsoft Research and three universities, have been published :
- Shahram Izadi, David Kim, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, Richard Newcombe, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, Dustin Freeman, Andrew Davison, and Andrew Fitzgibbon, KinectFusion: Real-time 3D Reconstruction and Interaction Using a Moving Depth Camera, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, October 2011
- Richard A. Newcombe, Shahram Izadi, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, David Kim, Andrew J. Davison, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, and Andrew Fitzgibbon, KinectFusion: Real-Time Dense Surface Mapping and Tracking, in IEEE ISMAR, IEEE, October 2011
Until now, Microsoft has not yet released the code of Kinect Fusion. Based on the scientific paper that describes the algorithms in some detail, an open source implementation of KinectFusion has been developed by the project team of the Point Cloud Library (PCL). Jasper Brekelmans from the Netherlands, Technical Director at Motek and developer of the Brekel Kinect Tool, compiled a binary version of the PCL solution (KinFu). He provides also an all-in-one OpenNI Kinect auto driver installer with all needed files to run his application or the Kinect Fusion program.
Another outstanding program to construct 3D models in realtime with a Kinect (or with another depht sensing device), based on the ideas of KinectFusion, is the project ReconstructMe developped by Christoph Heindl of PROFACTOR GmbH.
Additional informations about the KinectFusion project are available at the following links :
- Daniel Castro : Kinect Fusion running! (Video)
- Thomas Whelan, John McDonald : Kintinuous: Spatially Extended KinectFusion