Just checking to see if Azure Kinect support is still happening?
It’s the highest quality depth sensor on the market, yet has a terrible body tracking api so I think supporting it would bring a lot of users your way.
Unfortunately, we cannot tell you the exact date, since the software is still in development and testing.
is the Azure Kinect support being developed for those NUITRACK versions that are currently available, or will it only be available for NUITRACK AI? In other words, will it be based on deep learning?
Hi Teddy345,
in general support for any new depth sensor isn’t directly related to AI version features, so we expect Kinect Azure support to be added to both versions (“classic” Nuitrack and Nuitrack AI). AI version is our top-first prioity at the moment.
Please tell what the main reason for your intention to use Nuitrack with Kinect Azure? Microsoft has their own body tracking API and we are trying to clearly understand why you don’t want to use it with Kinect Azure. It will be very helpful if you could provide some insights. Thank you.
Microsoft went with an AI model for Azure Kinect that requires Cuda drivers (powerful Nvidia GPU), this is exclusionary, hogs a-lot of resources, doesn’t run fast, has more latency than previous generations of Kinect. The tracking isn’t smooth and performant, because machine learning body tracking (cubemos, posenet, etc) is often quite jittery.
We use Kinect body-tracking as a musical instrument and this requires the speed, efficiency, and smoothness of the older random forest body tracking model (like Nuitrack classic). Many developers distributing software can’t limit it to users with powerful Nvidia configurations, especially medical developers.
The dev community has been begging for over a year so you guys would be heros if you supported it:
Thanks a lot for for your response. Apart from the performance issues raised by sinjin which we also see is that I noticed some recent patent covering neural networks for skeleton model generation and body pose classification covering repeated movements broadly. I am not a lawyer, but I guess the claims can be read that way. Microsoft Kinect Azure SDK, NUITRACK AI, and further tools might be covered by this IP when used for analysing repeated body movements (which means a lot of applications). I assume the patent is invalid, but it would be good to have an alternative in place, and that alternative would be a version of the current NUITRACK including the Kinect Azure.
Dear all,
we are very happy to announce that long-awaited Azure Kinect support was added in the latest Nuitrack release. Please feel free to try it out.