metavision_driver

A ROS2 driver for event based cameras using Prophesee’s Metavision SDK. This driver is not written or supported by Prophesee.

If you are looking for more speed and features than the official Prophesee ROS driver you have found the right repository. This driver can cope with the large amount of data produced by Prophesee’s Gen3 and later sensors because it does little more than getting the RAW (currently EVT3 format) events from the camera and publishing them in ROS event_camera_msgs format.

The events can be decoded and displayed using the following ROS packages:

• event_camera_codecs has C++ routines to decode event_camera_msgs.
• event_camera_py module for fast event decoding in python.
• event_camera_renderer a node / nodelet that renders and publishes ROS image messages.
• event_camera_tools a set of tools to echo, monitor performance and convert event_camera_msgs to legacy formats and into “RAW” format.

Supported platforms

Tested on ROS2 Humble and later with Metavision SDK (OpenEB) 5.0.0 Notes:

• Metavision 4.2.0 and 4.6.2 worked in previous versions but are no longer tested
• ROS1 is EOL and no longer supported. There is however an unmaintained ROS1 branch.

Tested on the following hardware:

• IDS ueye XCP-E
• SilkyEVCam VGA (Gen 3.1 sensor)
• SilkyEVCam HD (Gen 4 sensor)
• Prophesee EVK4 (Gen 4 sensor)

Explicitly not supported: any data in the old EVT2 format. The sensor must produce data in the EVT3 format. The new EVT4 format is not yet supported.

Installation from binaries

Install apt packages via

sudo apt install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-metavision-driver

This will also install a version of OpenEB under /opt/ros/${ROS_DISTRO}, and the driver will preference those libraries over OpenEB/MetavisionSDK libraries installed elsewhere. But beware that paths are set up correctly for other applications such that they pick up the libraries they have been built against.

On top of installing the driver binaries, you will have to install the right udev files and, (for non-Prophesee cameras) also the camera-specific plugins.

• For Prophesee EVK cameras: Unless you also install OpenEB, install the required udev rules from the source tree directory udev/rules.d/, and restart udev, see OpenEB.

• For the SilkyEV cameras, install the plugin that matches the OpenEB version that the ROS OpenEB vendor package is currently using (see the CMakeLists.txt file). The required udev files should be automatically installed by the plugin installer. Make
• For the IDS cameras, download the plugin (a debian package) from the “Downloads” tab of the respective camera page, for instance for the XCP-E camera. Get the version that matches the one that the ROS OpenEB vendor package is currently using (see the CMakeLists.txt file). The debian package however depends on the metavision-sdk-bin package. To avoid installing said package, extract the files from the plugin package, run the install scripts for the udev files and plugins, and copy the plugins into the right location:

  dpkg-deb -x ./ueye-evs_5.0.0.3_amd64.deb  ./ids  # extract all files in deb package into "ids" directory
  sudo ./ids/usr/lib/ids/ueye_evs/scripts/add_udev_rules.sh
  sudo ./ids/usr/lib/ids/ueye_evs/scripts/add_ueye_evs_users_group.sh
  sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/ids/ueye_evs/hal/plugins
  sudo cp ./ids/usr/lib/ids/ueye_evs/hal/plugins/lib*.so /usr/lib/ids/ueye_evs/hal/plugins/
  

Finally, make sure that the MV_HAL_PLUGIN_PATH is pointing to the plugins:

export MV_HAL_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib/CenturyArks/hal/plugins:/usr/lib/ids/ueye_evs/hal/plugins

If you can’t get the binary installation working, install OpenEB and the plugins, and build the ROS driver from source, without using the openeb_vendor package. The ROS metavision driver should recognize that OpenEB is installed, and compile against those header files and libraries.

How to build from source

Prerequisites:

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