registered depth image is black

edit

Apparently the newest version of OpenNI has a bug where, in ROS:

1. Point clouds are available in /camera/depth_registered/points even if the depth_registration flag is off.

2. When the depth_registration flag is off, the clouds do not seem depth registered.

3. When the depth_registration flag is on, the point clouds and the corresponding depth image are filled with NaN values.

That may be a bug in the latest version of OpenNI or an incompatibility between the latest version and ROS. I haven't seen any reports of people having this problem outside of ROS, but that may be just because I haven't looked enough.

This is likely a bug on the implementation, i'v open a issue ticket on github, and i sugest that if you have the same problem to do the same (in my ticket or in another).

Here it is: https://github.com/ros-drivers/openni_camera/issues/13

I recently came across the same problem (On Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid with ros fuerte), and managed to resolve the issue as follows:

First install openni_camera and openni_launch:

$ sudo apt-get install openni_camera
$ sudo apt-get install openni_launch

Now, the problem with this appears to be as on ht.tp://www.ros.org/wiki/openni#Fuerte_migration_guide, except I had trouble actually getting openni-dev and ps-engine to install. What I ended up doing was to first copy openni_camera and openni_launch:

$ roscd openni_camera
$ cd ..
$ sudo cp -r openni_camera openni_camera_backup
$ sudo cp -r openni_launch openni_launch_backup

Then I installed openni-dev and ps-engine (this will tell you that it is going to delete openni_camera and openni_launch! This is expected, say yes):

$ sudo apt-get install openni-dev
$ sudo apt-get install ps-engine

Then restore from your backups:

$ sudo mv openni_camera_backup openni_camera
$ sudo mv openni_launch_backup openni_launch 
$ roscd openni_camera

Now follow the steps at ht.tp://www.ros.org/wiki/openni#Fuerte_migration_guide (edit manifest.xml and Cmakelists.txt, in manifest.xml, remove the line '<rosdep name="libopenni-dev"/>').

$ rosmake

The depth registration image should now work. The basic idea was that you wanted openni_camera to use openni-dev instead of libopenni-dev, but you can't install openni-dev with apt-get without uninstalling openni-camera simultaneously.