[HN Gopher] Best RealSense replacements?
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Best RealSense replacements?
Author : paulkrush
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-08-18 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| spencerflem wrote:
| Realsense cameras were cool, it's a shame to see them go :(
| KiDD wrote:
| I hope development continues as an open source project. I just
| got an Intel L515 not that long ago and it is pretty great!
| grawp wrote:
| Is there some GPU or FPGA opensource implementation of depth
| camera comparable to RealSense in quality of its output?
|
| I've seen many projects that call themself opensource while
| utilizing RealSense and I always scream internally how can they
| call themself opensource when absolute most of the work is being
| done by nongeneric and essential/irreplacable piece of
| proprietary technology.
| helge9210 wrote:
| 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
| bsenftner wrote:
| Like you, I have used other cameras from this company, and I'd
| say they know what they are doing. Probably worth checking out.
| walterbell wrote:
| Any idea on retail pricing, e.g. is there a comparable model
| to RealSense? There's no obvious "Buy" button on the site.
| lockless wrote:
| I have been using Intel's D-435i for 6D object Pose estimation
| and i have to say i was not really happy with the quality of the
| retrieved depth-frames. The Depth images are very noisy, flat
| surfaces appear heavily wavy thus making it difficult to apply it
| for tasks that demand a relatively exact 3D representation of the
| surrounding Space, which is a problem that has been mentioned in
| a few issues by several other clients. Just Google ghost noise or
| wavyy Noise D-435i.
|
| Moreover the AI implementier is actually Not really AI, it's just
| a bunch of common filters for depth-noise reduction such as a
| Median filter, just look up the filters. And lastly the depth-
| measurement becomes more unexact the further the point is away,
| therefore making it necessary to apply a depth-correction, in my
| case a correction polynom of 2nd Order.
|
| All in all i have to say i'd not use it again, especially not in
| industrial contexts. The Kinectv2 delivers a much more stable and
| reliable depth-image, Even though the realsense programming
| Interface is mostly nice to work with.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| The L515 is AFAIK based on scanning MEMS rather than structured
| light on the 435 and together with its integrated "normal"
| camera should give better results (did for us).
| paulkrush wrote:
| I second the L515 as it's much cleaner then the D435(if you
| need this). That being said the L515 is not like scanning
| LiDAR, but it's great tool at the price point.
| lucb1e wrote:
| 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?
| a-dub wrote:
| i remember in 2020 they were running a pretty aggressive ad
| campaign that made me think "hmm. they seem starved for
| applications."
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| porphyra wrote:
| 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
| sleepybrett wrote:
| There is a depth camera in every new iphone.
| dheera wrote:
| > 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
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They're not that good but people will tolerate poor
| quality.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| https://siliconangle.com/2021/08/17/intel-shutting-realsense...
| porphyra wrote:
| The Kinect Azure outperforms the RealSense devices.
|
| There are also devices based on the Infineon lidar, such as the
| pieye Nimbus 3D camera.
| ansgri wrote:
| 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/
| croes wrote:
| Does the Kinect 2 still outperform the Azure Kinect at body
| tracking?
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/Azure-Kinect-Sensor-SDK/issues/...
| awal2 wrote:
| I've worked with these (Azure Kinect), and they are quite nice,
| but they are much bigger and heavier and require a lot more
| power.
| paulkrush wrote:
| 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.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Sorry to hear about the Kinect delay. The device works very
| well in my experience.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| also very very expensive.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Take a look at the Stereolabs Zed cameras.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| But be aware that they are rolling shutter and only barely
| synchronized.
| dheera wrote:
| Zed sucks, they eat into your GPU instead of on-board ASIC so
| you have no GPU left to do neural nets or anything else.
|
| RealSense on the other hand does computations on-board and
| consumes very little CPU and no GPU.
| krasin wrote:
| Zed cameras has a very hostile EULA (borderline illegal, but
| IANAL), I would not recommend using them unless it's absolutely
| the only option.
| ansgri wrote:
| Didn't know about that, could you point at specific bad
| parts?
| krasin wrote:
| 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.
| ansgri wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| You can make extra-long USB connections with USB-over-fibre
| products like [1] (if you've got the money)
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/FIBBR-Cable-Female-Active-
| Extension...
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I've really enjoyed using Luxonis's OAK-D camera. First
| Kickstarter I've gotten, and does what they said it would. They
| have a very active Discord channel as well.
| krasin wrote:
| Sounds interesting, thanks for sharing.
|
| How is the quality compared to RealSense? Do I understand
| correctly that OAK-D camera requires two cables (USB-C and
| barrel jack power), not just one?
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I can't directly compare quality as I've not used Realsense
| devices, but the main difference is that the OAK-D uses
| stereoscopy without IR. I've been playing with it in various
| light conditions and it's surprisingly robust in low light as
| long as features are visible in both cameras. It only
| requires 1 USB-C cable if you're using it over USB3(i.e. a
| device that can source >1A iirc). I use it with a Jetson
| Nano(albeit not to its full capacity-yet) with just the USB.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Intel is giving up on its AI-powered RealSense cameras_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28218354 - Aug 2021 (10
| comments)
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| onedognight wrote:
| 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.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Put an NVIDIA Jetson Nano in between and you also have
| hardware matching.
|
| IR projector is $19: https://www2.mouser.com/ProductDetail/am
| s/AQAA-20?qs=DRkmTr7...
| gary_0 wrote:
| That one only has 4700 dots, which severely limits the
| potential applications. The one in the iPhone face scanner
| has 30,000 dots. (Last time I looked, it was very hard to
| source IR projectors that you could use to make a
| reasonably accurate depth camera.)
| WJW wrote:
| This seems a little bit like claiming that while you can't
| deliver an aircraft carrier right now, you do have several
| canoes available and since they both float it's basically
| the same thing.
| [deleted]
| spieswl wrote:
| 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.
| paulkrush wrote:
| This kind of makes sense as bigger customers would have to have
| some sort of availability contract. I guess we just have to
| wait for statements. Realsense cameras that are not being
| developed, but promised to be available for purchase for 5-10
| years might still be better than anything else out there, or at
| least to bridge us through the chipageddon gap. Does Realsense
| see the threat of 3D image sensors/solid state/flash LiDARs
| taking over and are bailing out early? I guess if this was the
| case why not just keep the L515 LiDAR?
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Intel is notorious for not giving reasonable EOL notices nor
| last-buy opportunities. I don't trust them as a supplier. I
| would not make the assumption that customers were treated
| well. Until I hear from my contacts, I assume nothing.
| (Source: worked at Intel for 11 years. Later worked at
| customers that got gored by this practice a couple of times.)
| gary_0 wrote:
| Structure Core? https://structure.io/structure-core
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