Real-Time Foreground Segmentation with Kinect Sensor

In the last years, economic multichannel sensors became very widespread. The most known of these devices is certainly the Microsoft Kinect, able to provide at the same time a color image and a depth map of the scene. However Kinect focuses specifically on human-computer interaction, so the SDK supplied with the sensors allows to achieve an efficient detection of foreground people but not of generic objects. This paper presents an alternative and more general solution for the foreground segmentation and a comparison with the standard background subtraction algorithm of Kinect. The proposed algorithm is a porting of a previous one that works on a Time-of-Flight camera, based on a combination of a Otsu thresholding and a region growing. The new implementation exploits the particular characteristic of Kinect sensor to achieve a fast and precise result.