Kinect's AI Breakthrough Explained

"Microsoft Research has just published a scientific paper (PDF) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkbG3KsY84 showing how the Kinect body tracking algorithm works — it's almost as impressive as some of the uses the Kinect has been put to. This article summarizes how Kinect does it. Quoting: '... What the team did next was to train a type of classifier called a decision forest, i.e. a collection of decision trees. Each tree was trained on a set of features on depth images that were pre-labeled with the target body parts. That is, the decision trees were modified until they gave the correct classification for a particular body part across the test set of images. Training just three trees using 1 million test images took about a day using a 1000-core cluster.http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/0...ough-Explained