ImageTransport

Seeing what the robot sees is one of the most important features of any user interface. To enable this, this library provides the ImageTransportSubscriber. It allows easy subscription of camera messages and provides them in a QML native format as a VideoSource.

Example:

ImageTransportSubscriber {
  id: imageSubscriber
  // Enter a valid image topic here
  topic: "/front_rgbd_cam/color/image_rect_color"
  // This is the default transport, change if compressed is not available
  defaultTransport: "compressed"
}

VideoOutput {
  anchors.fill: parent
  // Can be used in increments of 90 to rotate the video
  orientation: 90
  source: imageSubscriber
}

The ImageTransportSubscriber can be used as the source of a VideoOutput to display the camera images as they are received. Additionally, it can be configured to show a blank image after x milliseconds using the timeout property which is set to 3000ms (3s) by default. This can be disabled by setting the timeout to 0. If you do not want the full camera rate, you can throttle the rate by setting throttleRate to a value greater than 0 (which is the default and disables throttling). E.g. a rate of 0.2 would show a new frame every 5 seconds. Since there is no ROS functionality for a throttled subscription, this means the image_transport::Subscriber is shut down and newly subscribed for each frame. This comes at some overhead, hence, it should only be used to throttle to low rates <1. To avoid all throttled subscribers subscribing at the same time causing huge network spikes, the throttled rates are load balanced by default. This can be disabled globally using ImageTransportManager::setLoadBalancingEnabled which is available in QML using the singleton ImageTransportManager.

API

class ImageTransportSubscriber : public QObjectRos

Public Functions

ImageTransportSubscriber(NodeHandle::Ptr nh, QString topic, quint32 queue_size)

Interface for QML. This is the surface the images are passed to.

The image base topic (without image_raw etc.). This value may change once the subscriber is connected and private topic names or remappings were evaluated. The default transport passed as transport hint. May be overridden by a parameter. (Default: compressed) Whether or not this ImageTransportSubscriber is subscribed to the given topic The latency from the sender to the received time in ms not including the conversion latency before displaying. This latency is based on the ROS time of the sending and receiving machines, hence, they need to be synchronized. The latency (in ms) from the reception of the image until it is in a displayable format. The full latency (in ms) from the camera to your display excluding drawing time. The framerate of the received camera frames in frames per second. The timeout when no image is received until a blank frame is served. Set to 0 to disable and always show last frame. Default is 3000 ms. The update rate to throttle image receiving in images per second. Set to 0 to disable throttling. Default is 0 (disabled). Whether the subscriber is active or not. Setting to false will shut down subscribers The playback state of this video source. Can be modified with play and pause

void play()

Starts playing the stream. If not enabled, will set enabled to true.

void pause()

Pauses the stream. Will not shut down the subscriber and therefore be quicker to resume at the cost of still consuming bandwidth.

void stop()

Shuts down the subscriber. Similar as setEnabled.

class ImageTransportManagerSingletonWrapper : public QObject

Public Functions

void setLoadBalancingEnabled(bool value)

Sets whether the manager should try to balance throttled subscriptions_ to ensure they don’t update at the same time which would result in network spikes.