How can the depth image be streamed directly as uint8 image instead of uint16?

[SSant15]

Hi everyone. I am using the Intel® RealSense™ Depth Camera D435 together with python and openCV. My goal is to convert the depth image from uint16 to uint8. At the moment I take in the image with enable_stream and set the format to: rs.format.z16. Is there a way to directly set the format to uint8 in the enable_stream function? Alternatively I tried to:

a) convert the function in opencv with astype (not recommended for images)

b) with convertTo from this intel forum

c) with img_as_ubyte from the module skimage

As I am struggling with delays, I want to ensure I'm doing the conversion in the most efficient way. Furthermore option b) and c) both distort the original image.

Thank you very much for any help!

[MartyG]

The RealSense 400 Series cameras only support 16-bit depth (Z16). Traditionally, the most popularly used ways to get an 8-bit image have been to convert the RealSense 16-bit stream to 8-bit data using OpenCV or MATLAB.

RealSense SDK 2.0 has a MATLAB wrapper to interface the SDK with MATLAB.

https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/tree/master/wrappers/matlab

Intel have created a sample program for the wrapper to capture and render the depth frame with a live device.

https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/master/wrappers/matlab/depth_example.m

Alternatively, a MATLAB product that may provide more comprehensive control of live camera data than the SDK 2.0 wrapper currently can may be the Image Processing Toolbox.

https://uk.mathworks.com/products/image.html

[SSant15]

Thank you very much for your reply! I am working with OpenCV. Do you know by any chance about a project working with OpenCV and transforming the image to uint8 without the function astype()?