Greetings,

This week I have finally found success with our implementation of ROS and OpenNI on our Linux Mint machine in the Forensics Lab. I ended up resolving our global frame issue and have received images from the Asus Xtion Pro Live in addition to point clouds!

When running roslaunch rviz rviz with OpenNI launch engaged using the following command:

I was prompted with the global frame within rviz which I proceeded to set the frame to ‘camera/link’ in order for data visualizations to be captured from the camera.

Here is an example of the global frame prior to the configuration:

Here is an example of the global frame after the configuration with ‘camera/link’:

After this, I added to the Displays tab in rviz a ‘camera/depth/points’ object which is visualized using PointCloud2 in rviz. Here is an example:

By selecting the PointCloud2 option, it added it to the main Displays tab in rviz which allowed me to finally view point clouds!

Here is an example of the screenshot from the first point cloud that I was able to get. Keep in mind the camera is not calibrated to be in a static location.

You can make out the desktop computers in the background and maybe office chairs. Here is the configuration with the visualization in rviz:

If you look closely at the image, you can see me in the point cloud as well as something that looks like my shadow; however, it is actually 3-dimensional so it is recognizing that my body is in front of the wall behind me creating the shadow like figure from not being able to see behind me.

In addition to this, I was able to change the configuration around to receive what looks like heat mapped images with points as squares. Here is the picture:

As you can see, that is me again in the point cloud with my hands raised over my head. An interesting thing to note is the style of the point cloud can be change so that pixels are generated as squares, circles, etc.

Finally, I’ve been writing some python code this week with OpenCV complied with OpenNI support in order to receive raw camera data. However, I’ve hit a road back as the code for OpenCV 3 and OpenNI have changed some of the OpenNI functions and constant around.

So for next week, be on the look out for some code to interact with the Asus Xtion Pro Live.

Thanks for reading,

Adam