What are the stereoscopic left and right intensity images?

[samontab]

The Intel RealSense camera supports these streams:

STREAM_TYPE_COLOR, STREAM_TYPE_DEPTH, STREAM_TYPE_IR, STREAM_TYPE_LEFT, STREAM_TYPE_RIGHT.

In terms of hardware, there are only two cameras, one which is tailored for IR and another one for RGB data.
Those 2 data streams are straightforward.

The depth stream is created somehow (probably intel's private algorithms), and exposed through the depth stream. By the way, is there anything public about how the depth image is generated? stereo?, IR pattern?, both?

But what are the left and right streams?, are they just the IR and RGB cameras exposed as a common intensity image?

And what would be the format of those streams?, under pxcimage.h I can only see the format listings for the usual 3 streams, but not for the left or right streams.

After reading the formats, I assume they are just 8-bit gray images, one from each camera.
So, is there any difference between the format PIXEL_FORMAT_Y8 and PIXEL_FORMAT_Y8_IR_RELATIVE?

[samontab]

I tried to use those 2 streams, left and right with the RealSense camera, and they don't work.

It seems that those streams are maybe just defined for compatibility with other cameras. When I initialize the RealSense camera asking for those streams, it gives me this error:

PXC_STATUS_ITEM_UNAVAILABLE= -3, /** Item not found/not available */

I still don't know what PIXEL_FORMAT_Y8_IR_RELATIVE represents though, as I can read the IR stream with PIXEL_FORMAT_Y8, but not with PIXEL_FORMAT_Y8_IR_RELATIVE.

[hape]

samontab wrote:

I tried to use those 2 streams, left and right with the RealSense camera, and they don't work.

Maybe you already found out yourself or somebody else told you. However, here are my two cents:

it seems to me that these two streams (left and right) are only available on the R200 camera featuring a Y16 Pixel Format. The F200 does not support these streams.