We’ve covered Microsoft Kinect a few times, particularly the release of the hacked open source drivers for the device. Hackers have been building their own projects with it, and Microsoft will be releasing an official SDK for Windows for the product as well. Windows 8 might make use of Kinect and similar features as well.
But even better than open source drivers for the device would be a completely open source alternative. One candidate for this is TLD, aka Predator, an object tracking system that works with normal web cameras on commodity hardware.
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TLD was created by Zdenek Kalal, a computer scientist focused on machine vision, during his Phd thesis. Here’s a video in which explains the project and its applications:
This isn’t exactly like Kinect (though Kalal’s profs both worked on Kinect at Microsoft Research), but it could enable some similar applications. Although he also plans to release a commercial version, Kalal has released a free version of the project under a GPL license. It’s available for Windows, OSX and Linux.
What do you think?
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