Acknowledgement

This project is a migration from ROS1 to ROS2. The original code was developed by CircusMonkey. I would like to express my gratitude for his contribution.

image2rtsp

This project enables the conversion of a selected ROS2 topic of type sensor_msgs::msg::Image or sensor_msgs::msg::CompressedImage into an RTSP stream, with an anticipated delay of approximately 0,3-0,4s. It also supports usb camera as a direct source. The generated stream can be utilized for various purposes such as remote control, object detection tasks, monitoring and more.

Currently supported and tested sensor_msgs::msg::Image formats: “rgb8”, “rgba8”, “rgb16”, “rgba16”, “bgr8”, “bgra8”, “bgr16”, “bgra16”, “mono8”, “mono16”, “yuv422_yuy2”.

Supported and tested sensor_msgs::msg::CompressedImage formats: “rgb8; jpeg compressed bgr8”. Other formats may work as well with some color scheme deviations. Please open an issue in this case and attach your ros2 bag, so i can fix it. If you need some specific unsupported format, create an issue and i will try to add it as soon as possible, but normally it takes pretty long, so dont hesitate to create a PR.

The development is being carried out on Ubuntu 22.04 with ROS2 Humble. Tested with Intel RealSense d435i.

You are reading now the README for a default ROS2 package. If you want to use this package written as a ROS2 component, checkout ros2_component branch.

Dependencies

• ROS2 Humble

• gstreamer libs:

sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-good1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev libgstrtspserver-1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad

Install

• Navigate to the root directory, create a new directory named ros2_ws/src, and then change the current working directory to ros2_ws/src:

      cd
      mkdir -p ros2_ws/src
      cd ros2_ws/src/
      

• Clone the package and then navigate into the directory image2rtsp:

      git clone https://github.com/maladzenkau/image2rtsp.git --single-branch
      

• Adjust parameters.yaml according to your needs:

      gedit ~/ros2_ws/src/image2rtsp/config/parameters.yaml
      

Example ROS2 Image topic stream

# If the source is a ros2 topic (default case)
  compressed:       False
  topic:            "color/image_raw"
  default_pipeline: |
                    ( appsrc name=imagesrc do-timestamp=true min-latency=0 
                      max-latency=0 max-bytes=1000 is-live=true !
                      videoconvert !
                      videoscale !
                      video/x-raw, framerate=30/1, width=640, height=480 !
                      x264enc tune=zerolatency bitrate=500 key-int-max=30 !
                      video/x-h264, profile=baseline !
                      rtph264pay name=pay0 pt=96 )

  # Notice: The framerate setting does not affect the RTSP stream — it entirely depends on the ros2 topic frequency. 
  # It is included in the pipeline and code for structural reasons. You can likely remove it from the pipeline without impacting the package's behavior.


  # If camera serves as a source
  camera:           False      
  camera_pipeline:  |
                    ( v4l2src device=/dev/video0 !
                      videoconvert !
                      videoscale !
                      video/x-raw, framerate=30/1, width=640, height=480 !
                      x264enc tune=zerolatency bitrate=500 key-int-max=30 !
                      video/x-h264, profile=baseline !
                      rtph264pay name=pay0 pt=96 )

  # Notice: Here the framerate might be set to the camera framerate, otherwise "503 Service Unavailable" error will appear.

  # RTSP setup
  mountpoint:       "/back"
  port:             "8554"
  local_only:       True     # True = rtsp://127.0.0.1:portAndMountpoint (The stream is accessible only from the local machine)
                             # False = rtsp://0.0.0.0:portAndMountpoint (The stream is accessible from the outside) 
                             # For example, to access the stream running on the machine with IP = 192.168.20.20,
                             # use rtsp://192.186.20.20:portAndMountpoint

• Save your configuration and navigate to ros2_ws colcon root, source and build the package:

      cd ~/ros2_ws/
      colcon build --packages-select image2rtsp
      

Run

• Source install and launch the package:

      source install/setup.bash
      ros2 launch image2rtsp image2rtsp.launch.py 
      

  Don't use **`ros2 run`**!

Check the stream

To check the stream, follow the instructions for gstreamer, mpv or VLC provided by CircusMonkey or use python script provided in this package (ensure before that the open-cv library is installed, if not pip install opencv-python). Open new terminal, ensure that the topic to be converted exists and the RTSP stream is running. Then:

gedit ~/ros2_ws/src/image2rtsp/python/rtsp.py

Replace the rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/back with your server’s IP address, port and mount point rtsp://YOUR_IP:PORT/MOUNT_POINT. Save and run:

cd ~/ros2_ws/
source install/setup.bash
ros2 launch image2rtsp rtsp.launch.py 

Note

• The YAML configuration allows you to fully customize the pipeline according to your needs (Useful insights can be found, for example, here). This package does not provide any built-in acceleration. As its stability has not been validated across a wide range of Linux systems using advanced hardware or software techniques, support for such configurations is left to the user. There are no plans to update the package to support GPU/CPU acceleration. Please do not open issues related to software/hardware acceleration if they are directly related to the GStreamer pipeline itself.