Original Question:
I'm working on this same issue and tried the solution you posted William. It seems like what I did should work, but when I republish the image data from the camera to a different topic (/displayed_image), the RVIZ camera view does not show the image, just a black screen. RVIZ doesn't even give out a warning, it shows that it is receiving the images. When I echo the topic data from /displayed_image, it seems like I get the same data as the actual camera topic. Any idea's as to why RVIZ is not correctly displaying my image?
Answer:
Thanks to the suggestion of William and Dornhege, I figured out a workaround. The issue was actually something with rviz (not sure what), but when I use rosrun image_view image_view <image_topic> it correctly shows either the camera view image or the blank screen image depending on my mux settings. For future reference for anyone trying to do something similar:
- Run your gazebo model with the camera
- Run your blank screen publisher (code for mine is below)
- Setup the mux: rosrun topic_tools mux topic_to_publish_to camera_topic blank_screen_topic mux:=image_mux
- To switch between the selected images use: rosrun topic_tools mux_select image_mux image_topic_to_display
- You can also do this through service calls, I haven't yet, but see http://wiki.ros.org/topic_tools/mux for details.
"Preformatted text" won't allow me to select the whole code... it just takes bits and pieces if I try to do the whole thing. However, here is the important bit (this node is not terribly difficult anyway).
def blanker():
rospy.init_node('blank_screen')
pub=rospy.Publisher('blank_screen', Image, queue_size=10)
rate = rospy.Rate(1)
while not rospy.is_shutdown():
img = Image()
img.data = [0 for _ in range(800*3600)] # data
img.height = 800
img.width =1200
img.step = 3600
img.is_bigendian = 0
img.encoding = "rgb8"
img.header = Header()
img.header.frame_id = "camera_link"
img.header.stamp = rospy.Time.now()
pub.publish(img)
rate.sleep()
