Azure Kinect DK

A developer-oriented RGB-D camera from Microsoft that combines a depth sensor, color camera, microphone array, and IMU in one device.

Azure Kinect DK is a developer kit Microsoft released in 2019. It packs a time-of-flight (ToF) depth camera — which measures distance from how long light takes to bounce back — a high-resolution color camera, a 7-microphone array, and an IMU (inertial measurement unit) into a single unit, along with a sensor SDK and a body-tracking SDK. Its depth data is high quality and comes with skeletal tracking, which made it a de facto standard RGB-D sensor in robotics and human-motion research. Microsoft announced in August 2023 that it was discontinuing the product. Orbbec’s Femto Bolt uses the same indirect time-of-flight (iToF) depth technology and is compatible with the Azure Kinect SDK interface; Microsoft has pointed to it as a replacement.

ExampleThe Azure Kinect body-tracking SDK reads out real-time skeletal joint positions, which a human-robot interaction system uses for pose recognition.

Also called

Kinect, Microsoft Kinect, Microsoft Azure Kinect DK

Related

Depth Camera · Indirect Time of Flight · Orbbec Femto Bolt · Human Pose Estimation · Microphone Array · Inertial Measurement Unit

Sources

Microsoft ending production of Azure Kinect Developer Kit - The Robot Report
Femto Bolt Comparison with Azure Kinect DK - Orbbec
Azure Kinect - Wikipedia

As of

2026-09