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 into an RTSP stream, with an anticipated delay of approximately 300-500ms. 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. Please note that the migration process is ongoing, and therefore, the complete functionality of the original package is not yet available.

Currently supported formats: "RGB", "RGB16", "RGBA", "RGBA16", "BGR", "BGR16", "BGRA", "BGRA16", "GRAY8", "GRAY16_LE".

The development is being carried out on Ubuntu 20.04 with ROS2 Foxy, also tested on Ubuntu 22.04 with ROS2 Humble.

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 Foxy/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
  

• Check the framerate of the topic to be subscribed:

  ros2 topic hz /someTopic
  

• Adjust parameters.yaml according to your needs:

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

Example ROS2 Image topic stream

# If camera serves as a source (switched off by default)
camera: False      
source: "v4l2src device=/dev/video0"

topic: "/color/image_raw"  # The ROS2 topic to subscribe to. Dont change, if you use a camera

# Parameters for both cases
mountpoint: "/back"        # Choose the mountpoint for the rtsp stream. 
                           # This will be able to be accessed from rtsp://<server_ip>/portAndMountpoint
bitrate: "500"
framerate: "30"            # Make sure that your framerate corresponds to the frequency of a topic you are subscribing to
caps_1: "video/x-raw,framerate="
capr_2: "/1,width=640,height=480"
                           # Set the caps to be applied after getting the ROS2 Image and before the x265 encoder. Ignore
                           # framerate setting here.
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 

Limitations

• As was previously mentioned, this package allows the conversion of only data source into an RTSP Stream.

To Do

• Add web camera ros2 topic formats
• Add compressed images formats (jpeg, png)