Stereolabs ZED Camera is billed as “The World’s First High Definition 3D Camera for Depth Sensing”. One of the main applications for the ZED is robotic vision, which is a perfect compliment to the Jetson Tegras. Here’s a brief install and demonstration video on both the Jetson TK1 and Jetson TX1 Development Kits. Looky here:
ZED Background
The ZED camera is a stereoscopic imaging camera which contains two high definition imagers. One imager is mounted on the left and the other on the right side of the camera enclosure. The camera provides a video stream, each frame of which consists of a composite of an image from each camera, side by side. The images are time synchronized. The video stream is sent over USB 3.0 to a host.
On the host, the frame in the stream is then converted to a depth map using the host GPU. The Stereolabs SDK on the host uses the geometry of the fixed distance between the imaging elements, and using the known field of view of the imagers calculates an accurate depth map.
The ZED can sense depth between 1 and 20 meters.
Software Installation
Installation on either of the Jetson Development Kits is straightforward. The Stereolabs SDK requires CUDA be installed on the Jetson and that USB 3.0 be enabled on the TK1. The default for the TX1 is that USB 3.0 is enabled.
To get the ZED SDK, go to the Stereolabs Developers website, then scroll to the ZED SDK for Jetson section. Download the appropriate version for the Jetson being used.
Note: More detailed and specific directions for installation of the SDK are available from Getting Started with Jetson TK1 and the ZED.
After downloading, in a Terminal switch over to the directory where you downloaded the SDK. Then ‘chmod +x’ the downloaded file and execute it from the terminal.
Tools and Samples
The installer places the SDK files in /usr/local/zed
There are a couple of useful tools in the ‘tools’ folder, and some sample applications in the ‘sample’ folder.
Conclusion
In the video, you could see that there are some issues with the video when using the explorer program. The video also shows the difference in performance of the Jetson TK1 versus the Jetson TX1. While the Jetson TK1 shows the depth map application running at about 8 frames per second, the Jetson TX1 runs the same program at around 18 frames per second. Just having opened the box and connected the camera, I don’t know what type of performance to expect on either platform but this is certainly something to start building on.