Stereo Viewer

The Bottlenose Stereo Viewer is a basic utility that helps with stereo image acquisition. Just as with eBUS Player, you can use this utility to visualize and acquire images mainly for calibration purpose.

Installing the Utility

To install the Stereo Viewer onto your computer,

For Windows

1. Download the bottlenose_utilities.exe software package here.
2. Uninstall any previously installed version. For this, you can use the Add or remove prgrams utility from your Windows Settings.
3. Double-click on the file and follow through with the installation process.

For Linux

You will have to install the utility from source. The source repository for the stereo_viewer utility can be accessed from here. Follow the instructions provided in the documentation page to clone and build the tool.

Using the Stereo Viewer

The Stereo Viewer can be used for basic tasks such as saving images, streaming from a camera, visualizing and saving disparity map.

Connecting a Bottlenose

1. Start your Stereo Viewer utility.

2. Click Connect to select a Bottlenose on the network. This assumes the camera connected and accessible.

Once connected, information from the select Bottlenose camera are displayed.

3. If needed, click the Device Control button to access and tune the camera settings such as exposure, gain, etc.

Acquiring Calibration Data

1. Connect the utility to your Bottlenose camera.
2. Set the folder to the location where to save the images. You can use the browse button or directly edit the folder path. Calibrator will create two sub-folders to store the images. The first one, cam0, for the left images and the other, cam1, for the right images.
3. Check the Acquire Calibration Data box to enable calibration data streaming on the camera. If unchecked, Calibrator will only stream and display whatever data (e.g., images or disparity) is coming from the camera.
4. Click the Start button to put the camera into streaming mode.
5. When ready, click Save to save the current pair of images. This should be repeated for any pair of images you would like to keep for calibration.
6. The Stop button can be used to stop streaming at any time.

Visualizing Disparity

The disparity mode is available only for the stereo version of Bottlenose. This assumes that the camera is calibrated and that calibration parameters have been uploaded back to the camera.

1. Connect the viewer to Bottlenose
2. Uncheck Acquire Calibration Data
3. Click Device Control and set the camera into disparity mode
   1. Under ImageFormatControl, choose the appropriate Width and Height and change the PixelFormat from YUV422_8 to Coord3D_C16
   2. Under Sensor/Image, set Undistortion and Rectification to True.
   3. If needed change other settings such as resolution, exposure, etc.
4. Click Start to begin streaming disparity from the camera.