metavision_driver

A combined ROS/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/ROS2 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 the following platforms:

• ROS Noetic (legacy, please transition to ROS2)
• ROS2 Humble and Rolling (also compiles on other versions, see CI)
• Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 LTS
• Metavision SDK (OpenEB) 4.2.0, 4.6.2, 5.0.0

Tested on the following hardware:

• 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

On ROS2 you can install via

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

This will also install a version of OpenEB under /opt/ros/${ROS_DISTRO}. Unless you separately install OpenEB you will still have to install the required udev rules from the source tree directory udev/rules.d/, and restart udev, see OpenEB. For the SilkyEV cameras make sure that the plugin version matches the version of the ROS OpenEB vendor package that is installed (check the CMakeLists.txt file), or the camera will not be recognized! If the driver does not find the camera, try building from source (see below).

How to build from source

Prerequisites:

• install OpenEB
• install vcs (ubuntu package python3-vcstool).

Make sure you have your ROS1 or ROS2 environment sourced such that ROS_VERSION is set. For example for ROS1 noetic:

source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash

Create a workspace (metavision_driver_ws), clone this repo, and use vcs to pull in the remaining dependencies:

pkg=metavision_driver
mkdir -p ~/${pkg}_ws/src
cd ~/${pkg}_ws
git clone https://github.com/ros-event-camera/metavision_driver.git src/${pkg}
cd src
vcs import < ${pkg}/${pkg}.repos
cd ..

Optional (ROS1): to use the efficient recording nodelet clone the nodelet_rosbag repository into our src tree:

git clone -b open_bag_later git@github.com:berndpfrommer/nodelet_rosbag.git src/nodelet_rosbag

Now configure and build:

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file

Any contribution that you make to this repository will be under the Apache 2 License, as dictated by that license:

5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise,
   any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work
   by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of
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   the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed
   with Licensor regarding such Contributions.

Contributors must sign-off each commit by adding a Signed-off-by: ... line to commit messages to certify that they have the right to submit the code they are contributing to the project according to the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).