Distributed System for 3d Remote Monitoring Using Kinect Depth Cameras

This article describes the design and development ofa system for remote indoor 3D monitoring using an undetermined number of Microsoft® Kinect sensors. In the proposed client-server system, the Kinect cameras can be connected to different computers, addressing this way the hardware limitation of one sensor per USB controller. The reason behind this limitation is the high bandwidth needed by the sensor, which becomes also an issue for the distributed system TCP/IP communications. Since traffic volume is too high, 3D data has to be compressed before it can be sent over the network. The solution consists in self-coding the Kinect data into RGB images and then using a standard multimedia codec to compress color maps. Information from different sources is collected into a central client computer, where point clouds are transformed to reconstruct the scene in 3D. An algorithm is proposed to conveniently merge the skeletons detected locally by each Kinect, so that monitoring of people is robust to self and inter-user occlusions. Final skeletons are labeled and trajectories of every joint can be saved for event reconstruction or further analysis.