Building the space scale or how to weigh a person with no gravity

Since the very beginning of space exploration, cosmonauts have suffered from weight losses which need to be particularly monitored during long term missions in space stations to insure their health and well being. In 1965-6 Thornton successfully built a device able to measure the body mass of cosmonauts in the micro-gravity space environment using passive linear spring-mass oscillators. Since then, space stations have been equipped with labs containing, among others, bulky devices like Thornton's. In this work we report recent advancements in computer vision algorithms allowing us to estimate the weight of a person within 4% error using 2D and 3D data extracted from a low-cost Kinect RGBD camera output.