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Key Features and Differences in the Kinect V1 Support

The Kinect® Adaptor lets you acquire images using a Kinect for Windows® device. Kinect devices are often used in automotive IVS, robotics, human-computer interaction (HCI), security systems, entertainment systems, game design, and civil engineering. Uses of Kinect devices include body analysis, 3-D mapping, gesture recognition, human travel patterns, and sports and games.

The Kinect adaptor is supported on 64-bit Windows.

Doing image acquisition with a Kinect for Windows camera is similar to using other cameras and adaptors, with these key differences:

  • The Kinect for Windows device has two separate physical sensors, and each one uses a different DeviceID in the videoinput object. The Kinect color sensor returns color image data. The Kinect depth sensor returns depth and skeletal data. For information about Kinect device discovery and the use of two device IDs, see Detect the Kinect V1 Devices.

  • The Kinect for Windows device returns four data streams. The image stream is returned by the color sensor and contains color data in various color formats. The depth stream is returned by the depth sensor and returns depth information in pixels. The skeletal stream is returned by the depth sensor and returns metadata about the skeletons. The audio stream is unused by Image Acquisition Toolbox™. For details on the streams, see Data Streams Returned by the Kinect V1 Adaptor in MATLAB.

  • The Kinect for Windows can track up to six people. It can provide full tracking on two people, and position tracking on up to four more.

  • In Image Acquisition Toolbox, you access skeletal metadata through the depth sensor object. For an example showing how to access the skeletal metadata, see Use Skeleton Viewer for Kinect V1 Skeletal Data.

Note

The Kinect adaptor is intended for use only with the Kinect for Windows sensor.

Note

With previous versions of the Image Acquisition Toolbox, the files for all of the adaptors were included in your installation. Starting with version R2014a, each adaptor is available separately through support packages via MATLAB® Add-Ons. In order to use the Image Acquisition Toolbox, you must install the adaptor that your camera uses, in this case, the Kinect for Windows Sensor support package. Also, to use Kinect for Windows V1 support, you must have version 1.6 of the Kinect for Windows Runtime installed on your system. If you do not already have it installed, it installs with the Kinect support package.