Kinect LabView Drivers

[Ryan Gordon]

Originally Posted by borifar

Hello Ryan,
You are doing excellent work on creating Labview driver. I am programming with Labview for > 15years. Some of my interests are visual inspection in manufacturing environment. I have used a cost effective approach and utilized consumer cameras (Canon, Olympus).Over the years I have created several measurement systems capable of measuring size with ~ 6 microns resolution (system cost <$1000) . To gain accurate measurements, the distance from the object to the camera has to be known. Several tricks can be used to resolve this, but since Kinect has a measurement laser it may have a lot of promise for automation. Do you know how accurately distance can be measured with the Kinect laser?
If you need any help with Labview Image analysis - let me know. I will be glad to help.
Regards
Boris

Hi Boris,

Thank you! The accuracy is 11bits of depth and converted into a standard measurement size is approximately 10 cm off at 4 m away, and less than 2 cm off within 2.5 m. However there is a minimum distance also needed for the Kinect, roughly 18 inches. There is lots of information here on it: http://openkinect.org/wiki/Imaging_Information There is talk about Microsoft using a higher resolution IR Projector to achieve better accuracy.

I'll definitely let you know if there's any questions I have with the image analysis

Regards,
Ryan Gordon

[borifar]

Hello Ryan,
Thank you for the link- very useful info!
Could you send me your phone # and a good time to call you. I would like to discuss some specifics off line.
My E-mail: bfarber@zircoa.com
Best regards
Boris
------------------------------

Dr. B.Farber
Senior Scientist
Zircoa Inc.
Solon, OH
bfarber@zircoa.com

[AndrewD]

Do you have a download link up for the Kinect Driver vi's?

[Ryan Gordon]

Hi, yes: https://github.com/RyanGordon/libfre...appers/labview

Enjoy

[borifar]

Hello Ryan,
Your dirver is working well, I was able to build a visual inspection system, which inspects ceramic crucibles. Resolution is very good - 0.1" depth and ~ 0.5 mm in cross sections. The great advantage that it allows to measure OD/ID, wall thickness, height and bottom support in one snapshort. I am not aware of any other system that provides this flexibility and speed.
The only issue is instability during startup, sometimes it takes several attempts to activate Kinect, turining power on and off and restarting Labview several times. Once Kinect is activated it works well and stable. If somebody is interested, I can share the results.
Are you planing to release new version with improved stability?
Regards
Boris

[Riobotics1]

Hi Ryan and folks who are following this thread,

Just wanted to let you know I was able to take things a little further by adding a 3D point cloud with the help of your code. Thanks for making interfacing to the kinect from LabVIEW a very simple process. Check out my post at http://riobotics.blogspot.com/2011/0...int-cloud.html. Cheers!

Also check out my youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LIL_h8JEpA

To Boris,
Yes I have noticed the same issue with activating the kinect. One time when I was debugging I used highlight execution in LabVIEW to slow things down, the program almost always works this way without error. Now that the kinect is activated, I'll run it at regular speed without any problems. So maybe, add a few delays in the initialization? Just my 2 cents.

[Ryan Gordon]

Riobotics, that is very cool to see! I look forward to seeing what you or other people can do with this

Originally Posted by borifar

Hello Ryan,
Your dirver is working well, I was able to build a visual inspection system, which inspects ceramic crucibles. Resolution is very good - 0.1" depth and ~ 0.5 mm in cross sections. The great advantage that it allows to measure OD/ID, wall thickness, height and bottom support in one snapshort. I am not aware of any other system that provides this flexibility and speed.
The only issue is instability during startup, sometimes it takes several attempts to activate Kinect, turining power on and off and restarting Labview several times. Once Kinect is activated it works well and stable. If somebody is interested, I can share the results.
Are you planing to release new version with improved stability?
Regards
Boris

Hi Boris,

That's good to hear; Yes I will continue to keep my github synced as fixes become available in the OpenKinect repository. I don't believe that any of the issues you're experiencing could be the result of the LabView wrapper itself but if there's evidence to suggest otherwise I'll be happy to take a closer look at my own code

[borifar]

Hello Ryan and John,
Kudos to both of you for advancing Labview interface for Kinect.
One comment regarding stability issues on start up. My experience dealing with this kind of issues on consumer camera’s interface with Labview- having a vi that just connect to Kinect and does nothing else- typically improve stability. I just found one trick to start-up Kinect - I used only get tilt state VI, so far I was able to connect and start Kinect with no problems. I agree with John, time delay on startup is very useful
Regards
Boris

[mvonstein]

Ryan-

Great work. Just got the Kinect sensor yesterday. Working on hooking it up now. My application interests are almost exactly the same as Boris.

I'd also be willing to help you if you need anything. I've been working with Labview and the vision development library for the last 4 - 5 years and have a lot of experience with "machine vision" algorithms.

Thanks,
Mike

[perfectcheerios]

sorry for bumping this but, has there been any advance on this?

[kws4000]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlgA2nlXUF8

Check'r out, man!

Just got this from my team's lead mentor.