[ros-users] Digital Camera 1394 in ROS?

[Patrick Mihelich]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 10:03 PM, Jack O'Quin <jack.oquin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Initial check-in for ROS port of Player camera1394 driver committed to
> ros-pkg/trunk/stacks/camera_drivers_experimental/camera1394.
>

Excellent, thanks for your work on this.

 * The code is GPL due to the Player driver license
>

We strongly prefer the BSD license, especially for components like this one
that are likely to see wide use. Even if there is an excellent GPLed dc1394
ROS driver, some users will be compelled to write their own to avoid the
licensing issues.

The LGPL license for libdc1394 is quite OK. The LGPL does not place
restrictions on the license of a work that links to the library.

  * It publishes CameraInfo and rviz can display images, but rviz
> complains about a bad P value (projection matrix).
>
> This matrix is not being set in the driver. Should it be? Is there a
> useful default value? Or, is that always handled later in the
> image_pipeline?
>

For monocular cameras you should set:
 * R (rotation matrix) to the 3x3 identity matrix.
 * P (projection matrix) to K (camera matrix) with a column of zeros
appended.

  * There is Bayer decoding in the driver.
>
> Is that OK, or is this only supposed to be done later in the
> image_pipeline?
>

In the other drivers we've opted not to do any bayer decoding, leaving that
to image_proc / stereo_image_proc. For consistency I'd say the image_raw
topic should be the raw (bayer) data straight from the camera. If you want
to do bayer decoding in the driver I would make that a separate topic.

  * Should this package be supported on Mac OS X?
>

I'm sure Mac users would appreciate it :). If you don't have a Mac to test
with perhaps someone else can do that.

Cheers,
Patrick
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