compressed_depth_image_transport: use RVL by default #177
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
I have changed the default depth compression codec from PNG to RVL, which will make the plugin work much better out of the box.
PNG encoding is extremely slow and computationally demanding, which makes it completely unsuitable for real-time streaming in scenarios where a more complex image processing pipeline is used.
On the other hand, RVL compression works extremely well and has very little overhead. In fact, according to the original paper by Microsoft Research, their algorithm is superior to PNG in every possible way:
Other than than, there's a bit of a hassle in setting up all your publishers to use RVL, because every single one of them separately needs a properly namespaced parameter to be set.
You might have wanted to keep the defaults unchanged to keep backwards compatibility with code that expects
image_raw/compressedDepth
to be a PNG-encodedsensor_msgs/CompressedImage
, but such code must obviously have been written the wrong way, because normally an image_transport subscriber would automatically apply the right decompression method, which is the case for most existing code.Given all the above, I don't see a reason why RVL should not be the default.