RGBD Calibration in ROS

The last few exercises were meant to give you some intuition around how camera calibration works and how it is performed in practice. However, in the upcoming project, you'll be calibrating your RGB-D camera using ROS’s image_pipeline, which contains a suite of packages that provide a wide variety of image manipulation tools. One of those tools is the camera_calibration package that allows easy calibration of Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D cameras.

The camera_calibration package works on the same principles you've been working with already, using a checkerboard as a target object for calibration. Check out this tutorial for more information about the tools that ROS provides for calibration.

The calibration process will allow you to combine the RGB camera data with the accompanying depth camera data to generate 3D point clouds. For now, we're going to move on to manipulating point cloud data directly, but in the project you will get a chance to start with raw RGB-D data and generate your own point clouds through the process of camera calibration.