New in Diamondback

Only released in EOL distros:   electric fuerte groovy

camera_pose has moved to github: https://github.com/ros-perception/camera_pose

Stability

Note that kinect_depth_calibration is part of a <1.0 stack, and thus it is still unreviewed and unstable. We are, however, actively using this stack in-house at Willow Garage with good results, and we're actively making improvements along the way.

We would definitely love to hear about any issues you encounter (via answers.ros.org) or any other feedback you may have during the development process. Also check out the troubleshooting page.

Overview

Kinect only setup

The kinect_depth_calibration package was designed primarily to verify the intrinsic calibration of the Kinect infrared camera. It does this by comparing the pose of a checkerboard detected in the infrared image, to the pose reported by the Kinect's internal depth computation.

High Level Operation

• User mounts a checkerboard rigidly in front of a Kinect
• User covers the Kinect's IR projector (e.g. with post-it notes), and captures the checkerboard pose in the IR camera.
• User uncovers the Kinect's IR projector, and captures the checkerboard 3D pointcloud.
• The kinect_depth_calibration package computes the difference in depth between the two data sets, resulting in a measure for the Kinect intrinsic calibration accuracy.

Requirements

• Checkerboard is mounted rigidly in front of the Kinect. It cannot move between samples.

• Kinect IR sensor has its intrinsics calibrated. See openni_camera/calibration for more details.

Running Bring up the Kinect camera first. Then, launch the calibration:

roslaunch kinect_depth_calibration test_calibration.launch image_ns:=camera/ir depth_ns:=camera/depth

Setup with other cameras

You can also use this package to verify both the intrinsics and extrinsics of an external camera attached to a Kinect.

Requirements

• Checkerboard is mounted rigidly in front of the Kinect. It cannot move between samples.

• Kinect IR sensor has its intrinsics calibrated. See openni_camera/calibration for more details.

• Kinect IR camera intrinsics have been verified (see section above)

• External camera is intrinsicly calibrated (see camera_calibration)

• External camera is rigidly attached to the Kinect, and is extrinsicly calibrated to the Kinect (see camera_pose_calibration)

Running Bring up the Kinect camera and the external camera. Then, launch the calibration:

roslaunch kinect_depth_calibration test_calibration.launch image_ns:=external_camera/rgb depth_ns:=camera/depth