Processing - exporting a movie or image sequence from kinect data

Question

I'm trying to find the fastest way to export a PNG sequence or movie with processing. I'm capturing Kinect data and currently, in each draw call, I'm using:

saveFrame("output/fames####.png");

but this is too slow. Anything I can do that's faster?

I'm using simple-openni for the kinect feed.

Ani · Answer 1 · 2012-07-12T20:15:40.067

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How long does it take you to process/encode one frame (and what time is acceptable to you)? You could try to buffer the data and have it asynchronously processed by a fixed number of worker threads. Otherwise you will have to resort to capturing video because then, the installed codec can use hardware acceleration/optimized CPU based encoding.

Edit: To absorb the encoding latency, you can use a Circular Buffer where you dump frames that need to be encoded. Then, launch Tasks that encode a set of frames in parallel. Once those finish, see if there are frames in the buffer and process those.

edited Jul 12 '12 at 20:15

answered Jun 29 '12 at 21:01

Ani

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it's just a slight (several ms delay) – mheavers Jun 29 '12 at 21:51
Ah, then simply (circular) buffering and having multiple threads encode the image should work wonders for you. – Ani Jun 29 '12 at 21:53
Do you have any links / additional info on circular buffering / multiple threads? – mheavers Jul 12 '12 at 20:04

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 30 '12 at 22:53

You can try to save to the .oni format and there's already a SimpleOpenNI Sample for recording and playing back. Even though this should use a lot of memory, I imagine it might still be faster than saveFrame()

The advantage of using the .oni format is you can easily process the nodes recorded with SimpleOpeni (for example skeleton/hand tracking or other features can be tested on a .oni recording). If you need images, there should ways to extract/parse .oni files

This ended up being the best solution for me in the end. – mheavers Jul 24 '12 at 16:20 — mheavers, Jul 24 '12 at 16:20

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 12 '12 at 05:05

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This might be to late, but you get a lot better performance if you save them as tif instead of png.

answered Dec 12 '12 at 05:05

Oscar Abraham

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Processing - exporting a movie or image sequence from kinect data

3 Answers3