Capturing facial videos with Kinect 2.0: A multithreaded open source tool and database

Despite the growing research interest in 2.5D and 3D video face processing, 3D facial videos are actually scarcely available. This work introduces a new open source tool, named FaceGrabber, for capturing human faces using Microsoft's Kinect 2.0. FaceGrabber permits the concurrent recording of various formats, including the raw 2D and 2.5D video streams, 3D point clouds and the 3D registered face model provided by the Kinect. The software is also able to convert different data formats and playback recorded results directly in 3D. In order to encourage research with Kinect 2.0 face data, we publish a new public video face database which was captured using FaceGrabber. The database comprises 40 individuals, performing the six universal emotions (disgust, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise) and two additional sequences.