Quality of Kinect Depth Information for Passive Posture Monitoring

The availability of a low cost device incorporating RGB and depth sensors, such as the Microsoft Kinect device, has enabled a plethora of applications and solutions aiming at automatic monitoring of gait and posture, in order to assess the subject’s behavior and possibly prevent future health problems. This paper discusses the quality of the information provided by the depth sensor the Kinect device is equipped with, in order to assess the precision of such information, in different operational contexts, and properly identify the performance that may be reasonably expected from the adoption of such device, in the field of passive monitoring of gait and posture. Some techniques borrowed from the image processing field are also suggested, in order to improve the depth information in specific conditions, by means of a low complexity post-processing of the raw depth data.