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.