Proxynect to enable multiple low-latency Kinect clients #401
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For a project I did, it was necessary to have one Kinect be used by two very separate programs.
The usual approach is to e.g. stream data over TCP. But this is rather slow with full-frame full-speed RGB/depth data.
Instead, I implemented an approach that uses shared memory IPC to share a single memory buffer with multiple clients. Synchronization and limited control over the depth stream are provided. The library works on POSIX systems supporting
shm_open
, which should cover Linux and OS X. No solution for Windows yet, but Cygwin supportsshm_open
which means that this should theoretically work under Windows if you're willing to use Cygwin.Usage is similar to using
fakenect
. Launch theproxydaemon
in the background, then have clients load libraries fromlib/proxynect
.One final advantage is that this approach enables "keep-alive" of the Kinect, which reduces startup time (for programs that are not persistent). This helped me a lot when developing, since I could rerun my app without having to wait for the Kinect depth stream to settle.