R200 switch from infrafred to stereo

[jacksonkr]

The Intel RealSense R200 supports both Infrared and stereoscopy. How can I select which of these techniques I want to scan with? That being said, is it possible to switch between the two scanning types within the same mapping session?

[matlabbe]

Hi,

Can you point out in the realsense github which functions to use to switch between these modes?

Well, it is possible to have RGB-D images and stereo images in the same database, but in different sessions. For example, one could start mapping with the Kinect, then hit stop, select stereo camera and hit start again: A new map is created in the same database and if a loop closure is found with the Kinect's map, they will be merged together (seeing RGB-D clouds and Stereo clouds at the same time).

cheers,
Mathieu

[jacksonkr]

As of right now I'm not even sure how to switch between the two.

The default mode seems to be stereo although I can't be sure. The reason I say that is because I'm getting some pretty intense noise compared to both the kinect v1 (laser projection) and kinect v2 (infrared light)

Do you know how to switch between the two? Does it require a new launch file?

[matlabbe]

No I was not aware that you can switch. I don't think you can switch at all (both IR cameras are used for depth estimation), see this page:

The R200 actually has 3 cameras providing RGB (color) and stereoscopic IR to produce depth.

It is like a Kinect v1 camera but with two IR cameras instead of one for the depth. I have more noise with R200 than with the Kinect too. (>=0.11.10) In 3D Rendering panel, you can activate noise filtering if you want to try.

cheers

[jacksonkr]

I didn't realize it was stereo IR, which confuses me even more as to why the noise is so bad and why dark-lit areas are losing odometry in rtabmap.

I think the ability to switch from IR / stereo rgb would require some tweaking in the librealsense library. I may investigate at some point in the future.

Also, I'm not finding this "3d rendering panel" you speak of. I'm running rtabmap 11.11 compiled from source on ubuntu 14.04 (4.4.0-16 generic)

^^^

I did find edit > view high-res point clouds... > cloud filtering (remove noisy points) which looks good but obviously this is a sort of post production

---

Also, I was tinkering around with the librealsense examples and the tracking is amazing. I'm not sure why it's acting goofy in rtabmap.

Promising examples to reference:
cpp-pointcloud
cpp-tutorial-3-pointcloud


if you look at cpp-capture you'll see the "noisy" data, I'm not sure it's noise though. It may only be a poor read of surfaces, still checking it out.

[matlabbe]

Hi,

In their examples, they show the full point cloud. For CPU/GPU efficiency, RTAB-Map decimates the point clouds by 4 by default. You can modify the parameters in the 3D Rendering panel in Preferences dialog:


The R200 depth images are small, so reducing the decimation parameter would create more dense point clouds. Here examples with default parameters (Decimation=4) and with Decimation=1:



EDIT: Another example with textured mesh


cheers

[jacksonkr]

Yes, decimation is exactly what I was looking for, thanks for that. I tinkered with the meshing as well but that really bogs down my machine.

This opened a pandora's box though, because now I'm going to tinker with every option in here :D