For the second part of my thesis, after messing around with various background subtraction algorithms in in openCV, I thought about what else I could do to add some value to this open ended research. I managed to get my hands on a Microsoft Kinect Camera which incorporated a normal camera and an infra-red camera.
The first issue I had, the Microsoft Kinect Camera I got wasn’t the developer version and it had a proprietary connector which doesn’t connect straight to a usb port. Good thing in this modern age is finding cheap adapters off ebay, but cheap sometimes also means waiting a while before I got the adapter and sometimes they don’t work… Fortunately, it wasn’t a complete waste as I needed part of the cable and following this guide I managed to make my own complete adapter.
The second issue was that I was trying to use the Kinect camera in MacOS with Python so it wasn’t natively supported as it would under Windows, but fortunately, the Libfreenect library provided drivers and wrappers to use make the Kinect work. Simply downloading the directory and navigating to the python folder in the wrappers folder and installing the files with
python setup.py install
To ensure that it is installed,
pip list
If libfreenect is listed then it is installed.
Justin Monogatari 