Cost-efficient RGB-D smart camera for people detection and tracking

We describe a software library we developed for efficiently using the Kinect v2, a time-of-flight RGB-D sensor, with an embedded system, the NVidia Jetson TK1, as a cost-efficient RGB-D smart camera for people detection and tracking. The speed-up needed for achieving real-time operation has been obtained using NVidia CUDA to concurrently generate and process the raw depth and infrared data and to create the three-dimensional point cloud. This library has been released as open source and the smart camera has been tested in real-world scenarios, as a people-detection node in an open-source multinode RGB-D tracking system (OpenPTrack) and onboard a service robot for endowing it with robust people-following capabilities. Moreover, we show that nonembedded computers also can benefit from our library in terms of people-detection frame rate.