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I want to reduce the resolution of the kinetic to speed up processing. For example ignoring every other pixel would reduce the resolution by half. Is there an easy way to do this using the current drivers?
On a similar note - is it possible to only look at one vertical or horizontal line of resolution and pretend my kinect is a laser scanner? Thanks!
Yes, the resolution of the Kinect can be decreased. At the default 640x480, you get over 300,000 points per scan. That was too much data for me to process, so in my launch files, I set my kinect like this:
<rosparam command="load" file="$(find openni_camera)/info/openni_params.yaml" />
<param name="rgb_frame_id" value="/openni_rgb_optical_frame" />
<param name="depth_frame_id" value="/openni_depth_optical_frame" />
<param name="use_indices" value="false" />
<param name="depth_registration" value="false" />
<param name="image_mode" value="8" />
<param name="depth_mode" value="8" />
<param name="debayering" value="0" />
<param name="depth_time_offset" value="0" />
<param name="image_time_offset" value="0" />
Note that here, I am NOT using the rgb camera at all for pointclouds, only for the image. This is the minimum amount of information I was able to obtain from the kinect and corresponds to roughly 19,200 points per scan.
However, this was STILL too much information. I tried pointcloud_to_laserscan along with voxel_grid filters, but I wasn't very happy with the results.
The node I wrote is very similar to pointcloud_to_laserscan, but still publishes a pointcloud2. What it does is adjusts the number of "slices" evenly through a range, so it gives the appearance of multiple laserscans. I haven't written it as a nodelet, but feel free to try it.
https://github.com/cwru-robotics/smart_wheelchair/tree/master/pcl_decimator">https://github.com/cwru-robotics/smart_wheelchair/tree/master/pcl_decimator
Video of this node mapping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rIAGKA6uS8 Video of this node mapping with full scan comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl6bi5Udfz4
Be sure to run dynamic reconfigure on this node, it makes tuning it very easy! Here's my default values:
<node pkg="pcl_decimator" type="pcl_decimator" respawn="true" name="pcl_slicer" output="screen">
<rosparam>
field_name: y
num_slices: 5
slice_width: 0.01
start_threshold: -1.0
end_threshold: 1.0
</rosparam>
</node>
Look at rosrun dynamic_reconfigure reconfigure_gui. You can adjust the resolution there while it is running.
The values can also be set as parameters.
Depending on what you need an alternative would be to use a downsampling nodelet. That way you would get a equal distribution of points in space.
For faking a laser, have at look at this package: pointcloud_to_laserscan.
You can do this with openni_camera alone with the (undocumented) use_indices parameter. See my answer to this question for details. The advantage over pointcloud_to_laserscan type approaches would be that you cut out the unused information as early as possible in the pipeline, i.e. the driver doesn't spend CPU cycles projecting a bunch of depth values to 3D points that never get used anyway. Depending on how much you need to drop your CPU usage that might be important (it was in my application which is why I implemented that feature).
Asked: 2011-06-22 02:26:57 -0500
Seen: 2,121 times
Last updated: Jun 22 '11
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