The potential of consumer depth cameras extends well beyond entertainment and gaming, to real-world commercial applications. This authoritative text reviews the scope and impact of this rapidly growing field, describing the most promising Kinect-based research activities, discussing significant current challenges, and showcasing exciting applications. Features: presents contributions from an international selection of preeminent authorities in their fields, from both academic and corporate research; addresses the classic problem of multi-view geometry of how to correlate images from different viewpoints to simultaneously estimate camera poses and world points; examines human pose estimation using video-rate depth images for gaming, motion capture, 3D human body scans, and hand pose recognition for sign language parsing; provides a review of approaches to various recognition problems, including category and instance learning of objects, and human activity recognition; with a Foreword by Dr. Jamie Shotton.

Dr. Andrea Fossati and Dr. Helmut Grabner are post-doctoral researchers in the Computer Vision Laboratory at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Dr. Juergen Gall is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany.

Dr. Xiaofeng Ren is a Research Scientist at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing, Intel Labs, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

Dr. Kurt Konolige is a Senior Researcher at Industrial Perception Inc., Palo Alto, CA, USA.