Isaac ROS Image Pipeline

NVIDIA-accelerated Image Pipeline.

Overview

Isaac ROS Image Pipeline is a metapackage of functionality for image processing. Camera output often needs pre-processing to meet the input requirements of multiple different perception functions. This can include cropping, resizing, mirroring, correcting for lens distortion, and color space conversion. For stereo cameras, additional processing is required to produce disparity between left + right images and a point cloud for depth perception.

This package is accelerated using the GPU and specialized hardware engines for image computation, replacing the CPU-based image_pipeline metapackage. Considerable effort has been made to ensure that replacing image_pipeline with isaac_ros_image_pipeline on a Jetson or GPU is as painless a transition as possible.

[!Note] Some image pre-processing functions use specialized hardware engines, which offload the GPU to make more compute available for other tasks.

Rectify corrects for lens distortion from the received camera sensor message. The rectified image is resized to the input resolution for disparity, using a crop before resizing to maintain image aspect ratio. The image is color space converted to YUV from RGB using the luma channel (the Y in YUV) to compute disparity using SGM. This common graph of nodes can be performed without the CPU processing a single pixel using isaac_ros_image_pipeline; in comparison, using image_pipeline, the CPU would process each pixel ~3 times.

The Isaac ROS Image Pipeline metapackage offloads the CPU from common image processing tasks so it can perform robotics functions best suited for the CPU.

ROS 2 Native rosidl::Buffer Acceleration

This package uses rosidl::Buffer, a feature built into ROS 2 Lyrical, to avoid unnecessary copies of large payloads between CPU and accelerator memory. The CUDA buffer backend builds on this native ROS 2 feature to provide CUDA memory storage and transport. Most applications can use standard ROS messages and conversion packages without depending directly on a buffer backend. See rosidl::Buffer and Buffer Backends for details.

Performance

Documentation

Please visit the Isaac ROS Documentation to learn how to use this repository.

Packages

• isaac_ros_depth_image_proc
  • API
• isaac_ros_image_pipeline
  • Replacing image_pipeline with isaac_ros_image_pipeline
• isaac_ros_image_proc
  • Quickstart
• isaac_ros_stereo_image_proc
  • Quickstart
  • Try More Examples
  • API

Latest

Update 2026-09-21: Migrated the image pipeline nodes from NITROS to rosidl::Buffer with the CUDA buffer backend

Isaac ROS Contribution Rules

Any contribution that you make to this repository will be under the Apache 2 License, as dictated by that license:

5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions.

Contributors must sign-off each commit by adding a Signed-off-by: ... line to commit messages to certify that they have the right to submit the code they are contributing to the project according to the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).