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Best RealSense replacements?

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Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#11
Your best bet is probably to order cheap IR or color industrial cameras and use stereo block matching. It's implemented in OpenCV and works okay-ish. For example, Basler dart USB3 cameras can be synchronized through the IO expension port.

That said, maybe it's time for someone to produce a good replacement. In my opinion, the RealSense was always quite pricey when compared with what it could do, especially now that we can just run AI algorithms on the edge.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#13
post #8
post #6

I'm out of this loop, why is it gone? Clicking on the repo it seems perfectly active, last release was a few days ago. The repo is not archived, the readme doesn't mention it's deprecated. What's going on here?

Intel EOLed RealSense https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/intel-says-i... https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/17/22629528/intel-realsense-... It's typical Intel behavior, they LOVE to EOL products with only sudden notice and not a milligram of effort to try to sell the business to someone who will maintain it.

I think depth cameras haven't really taken off.

One issue is that, with neural networks, you can accomplish many things a depth camera can do without the depth camera.

For instance you can train a neural network to guess at a depth field for a scene. It's not going to deal with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_room

but it is good enough for many purposes. Similarly you can train a neural network to separate the speaker on a video call from the background, so you just don't need a depth camera.

On top of that people just haven't found applications for depth cameras that are all that compelling. I guess "Windows Hello" uses something like a depth camera but that creates a strong incentive for the camera's functionality not be exposed to the end user because if you can see what the camera sees you are in a much better place to abuse it.

The other thing is that depth cameras just haven't gotten better from a practical point of view. On paper the XBOX One Kinect is a lot better than the original Kinect but in practice it doesn't perform any better.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel EOLed RealSense https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/intel-says-i... https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/17/22629528/intel-realsense-... It's typical Intel behavior, they LOVE to EOL products with only sudden notice and not a milligram of effort to try to sell the business to someone who will maintain it.

I think depth cameras haven't really taken off. One issue is that, with neural networks, you can accomplish many things a depth camera can do without the depth camera. For instance you can train a neural network to guess at a depth field for a scene. It's not going to deal with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_room but it is good enough for many purposes. Similarly you can train a neural network to separate the spe…

> Similarly you can train a neural network to separate the speaker on a video call from the background, so you just don't need a depth camera.

These still look so fake, and they tend to blur out objects that you're trying to hold up in the video, that I actually created my own virtual camera that blurs progressively more over depths based on RealSense measured depth and looks far more realistic.

https://github.com/dheera/bokeh-camera

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#15
post #6

I'm out of this loop, why is it gone? Clicking on the repo it seems perfectly active, last release was a few days ago. The repo is not archived, the readme doesn't mention it's deprecated. What's going on here?

i remember in 2020 they were running a pretty aggressive ad campaign that made me think "hmm. they seem starved for applications."

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#16

I haven't used these specific cameras, but enjoyed working with the company as client. https://en.ids-imaging.com/ensenso-stereo-3d-camera.html

Like you, I have used other cameras from this company, and I'd say they know what they are doing. Probably worth checking out.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#18
post #2

The Kinect Azure outperforms the RealSense devices. There are also devices based on the Infineon lidar, such as the pieye Nimbus 3D camera.

I just called for Kinect Azure and they told me Oct 2022 for next stock. Thanks I will have too look into the Infineon lidar. I'm guessing Velabit is a chipageddon story as well.

Sorry to hear about the Kinect delay. The device works very well in my experience.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#19
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think depth cameras haven't really taken off. One issue is that, with neural networks, you can accomplish many things a depth camera can do without the depth camera. For instance you can train a neural network to guess at a depth field for a scene. It's not going to deal with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_room but it is good enough for many purposes. Similarly you can train a neural network to separate the spe…

> Similarly you can train a neural network to separate the speaker on a video call from the background, so you just don't need a depth camera. These still look so fake, and they tend to blur out objects that you're trying to hold up in the video, that I actually created my own virtual camera that blurs progressively more over depths based on RealSense measured depth and looks far more realistic. https://github.com/dh…

They're not that good but people will tolerate poor quality.
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