KinectFusion

Microsoft Kinect Fusion Demo Picture

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 :

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 :