Introduction to the special issue on visual understanding and applications with RGB-D cameras

The prevalence of affordable RGB-D cameras, such as Microsoft's Kinect and ASUS’s Xtion Pro Live Sensors, is driving a revolution of the landscape of computer vision and vision related research. The pixel-level depth and visual (RGB) information provided by a RGB-D camera not only enables robust vision applications but also opens up new research problems and opportunities across a wide range of areas including 3D perception, robotics, human machine interactions, and intelligent surveillance. Since the first release of Microsoft Kinect sensors in November 2010, we have witnessed a rapid growth of research in visual understanding and applications with RBG-D cameras.