Record and visualize cameras#
Parrot Sphinx comes with a few tools to record and visualize video frames:
sphinx-cli: command line utility also capable of displaying and recording video frames
Web dashboard / sphinx-cli: a multi-step user interface to record video frames
sphinx-cli camera#
sphinx-cli
called with the subcommand camera
becomes a utility
that lets you visualize and record video frames for any simulated camera.
For the most current list of commands and options, execute
sphinx-cli camera --help
.
Before issuing any further commands, it is helpful to know what cameras are available. Here is how you can generate a list of cameras:
$ sphinx-cli camera -l
Here is an example of how to display camera frames in a new window in real-time:
$ sphinx-cli camera front_streaming
Here is a command line example that records 5 consecutive frames from the front camera and saves them in current directory:
$ sphinx-cli camera front_streaming -n --count=5 -o .
By default, RGB images are saved in PNG format, grayscale images in PGM format, and floating-point images in OpenEXR format.
Using the Web dashboard / sphinx-cli#
Parrot Sphinx is able to record raw video frames into separate files using the
Web dashboard, or the sphinx-cli
utility.
To do that, open the widget called inspector
(see
Interact with the simulation for more details), and search for recording
parameters. For the camera you want to record:
set the directory where to store the output files in
recording/path
. If kept empty the files are going to be written into Parrot Sphinx’s current working directory.to start the recording, write
true
or1
into therecording/enable
parameter.to stop it, write
false
or0
.
By default, images are saved in PNG format. For floating-point images like depth
maps, the file format can bet set to
Radiance RGBE HDR to
preserve the original values. This is done by setting the recording/format
parameter to hdr
.
The same sequence of operations can be performed from the command line with
the sphinx-cli
tool by executing a series of param
subcommands (see
Interact with the simulation for more information on how to use
sphinx-cli
).
Note
This method is less efficient than sphinx-cli camera
because it saves the
images on the same thread that receives the frames in Parrot Sphinx.