The KinectΓÇÖs Body Part Recognition Algorithm on an FPGA

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 3:30

The Microsoft Kinect has received little to no attention by the hardware community, specifically those interested in reconfigurable hardware via field-programmable gate-arrays (FGPAs). This is likely due to both the lack of interfaces and to potential hardware applications. This research project takes a step forward in both directions. We present our findings with attempting to interface the Kinect device to a modern Xilinx MLxxx development board; a common platform for hardware development using FPGAs. In addition, and most importantly, we present a fully-functional hardware implementation of a body part recognition algorithm written entirely in a hardware descriptive language (HDL). The algorithm uses randomized decision trees for computing the probabilistic location of body parts on a human. We present a complete architecture for the design and present a hardware simulation. We predict significant speed-ups over even parallelized software versions of the algorithm and discuss future optimizations.