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Bumblebee Reverse engineering Calibration

asked 2013-04-05 11:01:17 -0600

INSA gravatar image

updated 2014-01-28 17:16:03 -0600

ngrennan gravatar image

Hi guys,

I am currently working with a Bumblebee2 stereo camera to do visual SLAM using ROS. This camera is very good but we cannot use the calibration files given by the company's camera in ROS. I have access to the rectified images but no way to publish them through ROS.

I would like to know if there is any solution to retrieve the calibration parameters by a reverse engineering method using the calibrated and uncalibrated images that i already have.

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answered 2013-04-05 11:20:52 -0600

William gravatar image

About a year ago we used the bumblebee2 very successfully in ROS, but we did not use the pointgrey library nor the factory provided calibration files:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9iAnATJuaQ

We used the standard ROS stereo image pipeline and calibration tools with the bumblebee2. We also had to modify the camera_drivers node to support format_7 firewire (two cameras on one cable):

https://github.com/Auburn-Automow/camera_drivers

I don't have time to walk you through the whole process, but perhaps some of the stuff in that repo will help.

Other resources:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/image_pipeline/Tutorials

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Thank William for your response, did you used the stereo_calibration node to calibrate the camera ? I used this one and got the following results : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59gd4OU5u7A&feature=youtu.be What do you think ?

INSA gravatar image INSA  ( 2013-04-05 11:24:57 -0600 )edit
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Also as good as we can calibrate this camera, we can never get the same calibration quality as the one given by pointgrey.

INSA gravatar image INSA  ( 2013-04-05 11:31:41 -0600 )edit

That video looks decently similar to what we were getting. We were able to make use of the data at this quality, but it might not be good enough for your application. We also verified the accuracy of our data against a Hokuyo lidar, and it seemed to work fairly well at close distances.

William gravatar image William  ( 2013-04-05 12:48:22 -0600 )edit

The pointgrey library and calibration both work really well, better than the generic stereo pipeline in ROS, but there are issues with it. The precompiled binary that pointgrey provides is statically linked against boost 1.37, whereas ROS links against 1.42 (at the time), so you could not link...

William gravatar image William  ( 2013-04-05 12:49:50 -0600 )edit

them to each other. So making a ROS node which utilizes the pointgrey system was not possible. One thing we played with before using the ROS stereo pipeline was to make a program which received images and sent the result of the pointgrey stereo library back and forth to ROS using protobuf and zeromq

William gravatar image William  ( 2013-04-05 12:51:42 -0600 )edit
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answered 2013-04-10 03:19:23 -0600

Miquel Massot gravatar image

We've been using BB2 cameras for a year or so, and we've recently published our own driver, which is a modification of camera1394 stereo driver. We use this cameras to do visual odometry and object recognition in ROS, and they've given us good results. Check the driver and the visual odometry libraries viso2 and fovis.

Regarding the calibration, since we use a watertight container for the cameras we do not use standard calibration. We use a stereo pipeline, just as William does, and we do our own callibration within ROS.

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I am using your driver and works perfectly. I only made some modification on the launchers, as ros new versions prefers rqt_reconfigure instead of the "dynamic_reconfigure"

vvaquero gravatar image vvaquero  ( 2014-05-16 07:36:18 -0600 )edit

True, I didn't check that. We're having some issues with rqt_reconfigure. The reconfigure method gets called too many times and it's difficult to set the parameters while streaming.

Miquel Massot gravatar image Miquel Massot  ( 2014-05-17 06:45:45 -0600 )edit

Are you referring to the camera1394stereo package? When I download that package using "sudo apt-get install camera1394stereo", I don't get any binary executables. I've downloaded the latest source and built it but am having problems calibrating based on that. Any thoughts?

jeremya gravatar image jeremya  ( 2015-10-02 11:53:22 -0600 )edit

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Asked: 2013-04-05 11:01:17 -0600

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Last updated: Apr 10 '13