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Best RealSense replacements?

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Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#21

Post by porphyra »

PaulHoule wrote: post #13
dheera wrote: 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…

Real depth cameras perform better and cost far less than the $1500 GPU that you're going to need to run the monocular depth network. Monocular depth still struggles to generalize to environments that are even slightly different from the training set.

Try git cloning niantic labs' monodepth2 (or whatever is the state of the art on Papers with Code) and running it on your living room. It's not good.

https://github.com/nianticlabs/monodepth2

https://paperswithcode.com/task/monocular-depth-estimation

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#22

Post by onedognight »

fxtentacle wrote: post #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 w…

There is no way this is a replacement for the RealSense depth cameras. These are USB, bus powered, factory calibrated, cameras doing the block matching in an ASIC. Often with an IR projector to help the matching. This like saying, oh well, I can’t find a GPU, so I’ll just compile Mesa for the CPU and my product will be fine.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#24

Post by ansgri »

ilaksh wrote: post #3

Take a look at the Stereolabs Zed cameras.

My company uses ZEDs now, and we are planning to use their new models which are weatherproof, and they currently seem to be the only inexpensive option for outdoor sensing that works out of box. And we don't like them: need your own GPU (at least they support Jetson & co.), not enough SW flexibility, USB-only connection limits the cable length.

Longer-term, we plan to use our own software with either a pair of conventional machine vision cameras, or, preferably, find some ready-made assembly of a pair of cameras + SoC with full user programmability since we like to be in control of our perception algorithms.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#25

Post by ansgri »

krasin wrote: post #23
ilaksh wrote: post #3

Take a look at the Stereolabs Zed cameras.

Zed cameras has a very hostile EULA (borderline illegal, but IANAL), I would not recommend using them unless it's absolutely the only option.

Didn't know about that, could you point at specific bad parts?

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#26

Post by ansgri »

porphyra wrote: 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.

There are also ToF cameras from Basler, we have their early model, and it works reasonably well, though hot and rather power-hungry. Based on that experience, their current models look promising: https://www.baslerweb.com/en/products/cameras/3d-cameras/

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#27

Post by krasin »

ansgri wrote: post #25
krasin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zed cameras has a very hostile EULA (borderline illegal, but IANAL), I would not recommend using them unless it's absolutely the only option.

Didn't know about that, could you point at specific bad parts?

Here is the license as of today:

``` 2. License

a. The Software is licensed to You, not sold. You are licensed to use the Software only as downloaded from the stereolabs.com website, and updated by STEREOLABS from time to time. You may not copy or reverse engineer the Software. b. As conditions to this Software license, You agree that:

        i.      You will use Your Software with ZED, ZED 2 or ZED Mini camera only and not with any other device (including). You will not use Unauthorized Accessories. They may not work or may stop working permanently after a Software update.

        ii.     You will not use or install any Unauthorized Software with an Authorized Accessory. If You do, Your ZED, ZED 2 or ZED Mini camera may stop working permanently at that time or after a later Software update.

        iii.    You will not attempt to defeat or circumvent any Software technical limitation, security, or anti-piracy system. If You do, Your ZED, ZED 2 or ZED Mini camera may stop working permanently at that time or after a later Software update.

        iv.     STEREOLABS may use technical measures, including Software updates, to limit use of the Software to the ZED, ZED 2 or ZED Mini camera, to prevent use of Unauthorized Accessories, and to protect the technical limitations, security and anti-piracy systems in the ZED, ZED 2 or ZED Mini camera.

        v.      STEREOLABS may update the Software from time to time without further notice to You, for example, to update any technical limitation, security, or anti-piracy system.
```

The problem with this license (beyond the fact that they are restricting a lot of user freedom) is that it's not specific. For instance, it's unclear if improving depth quality by applying an extra median filter is a violation of iii as it eliminates a technical limitation.

While I don't expect them to actually go after their users, the fact that EULA is so hostile was the reason we can't use it in our team.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#28

Post by spieswl »

Incoming hearsay, but I've heard conflicting things from RealSense integrators on what Intel is actually doing with this product over the longer term. Someone mentioned that ongoing R&D is being shuttered, but the depth camera product would still be available for purchase for a while. It would be nice to get some more clarity on what's actually happening.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#29

Post by sleepybrett »

PaulHoule wrote: post #13
dheera wrote: 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…

There is a depth camera in every new iphone.

Re: Best RealSense replacements?

#30

Post by sleepybrett »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #18
paulkrush wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

also very very expensive.
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