On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Edwards, Shaun M. wrote: > +1 if the compress/decompress helps with point clouds and images. > I'm quite confident it will help with point clouds and images. Also occupancy grids should compress very well. For images though, it might not work as well as the image_transport plugin. The latter can take advantage of more knowledge and use lossy compression (Jpeg or Theora) to reduce the bandwidth more drastically. For lossless compression, it should be roughly equivalent: PNG and BZ2 use very algorithm AFAIK. This is actually a good point in favour of having the two mechanisms: a generic preprocessing of the messages at the level of the publisher/subscriber and a message transport architecture that can be instantiated for specialized preprocessing on well defined types. -- Cedric Pradalier