The potential of consumer depth cameras extends well beyond entertainment and gaming, to real-world commercial applications. This authoritative text reviews the scope and impact of this rapidly growing field, describing the most promising Kinect-based research activities, discussing significant current challenges, and showcasing exciting applications. Features: presents contributions from an international selection of preeminent authorities in their fields, from both academic and corporate research; addresses the classic problem of multi-view geometry of how to correlate images from different viewpoints to simultaneously estimate camera poses and world points; examines human pose estimation using video-rate depth images for gaming, motion capture, 3D human body scans, and hand pose recognition for sign language parsing; provides a review of approaches to various recognition problems, including category and instance learning of objects, and human activity recognition; with a Foreword by Dr. Jamie Shotton.

Describes a topic of computer vision that will be key in coming years

Part I: 3D Registration and Reconstruction.3D with Kinect.- Real-Time RGB-D Mapping and 3-D Modeling on the GPU using the Random Ball Cover.- A Brute Force Approach to Depth Camera Odometry.Part II: Human Body Analysis.Key Developments in Human Pose Estimation for Kinect.- A Data-Driven Approach for Real-Time Full Body Pose Reconstruction from a Depth Camera.- Home 3D Body Scans from a Single Kinect.- Real-Time Hand Pose Estimation using Depth Sensors.Part III: RGB-D Datasets.A Category-Level 3D Object Dataset: Putting the Kinect to Work.- RGB-D Object Recognition: Features, Algorithms, and a Large Scale Benchmark.- RGBD-HuDaAct: A Color-Depth Video Database for Human Daily Activity Recognition.