Hello,
I am using a ZED 2 camera with the ZED ROS 2 wrapper on ROS 2 Jazzy.
Description
When viewing the camera directly in ZED Explorer, the image stream appears stable and correct. I monitored it for several minutes and did not observe any flickering or visual corruption.
However, when using the ROS 2 image topics published by the ZED ROS 2 wrapper, I occasionally observe image artifacts.
The artifacts appear as:
- Image flickering
- Partial mixing of two consecutive frames
- Regions of the image appearing to belong to different frames
The issue is intermittent and does not occur continuously.
Additional testing
I initially observed the issue using:
rqt
subscribed to:
/zed/zed_node/rgb/color/rect/image
To rule out an RQt-specific issue, I also tested using:
ros2 run image_tools showimage --ros-args -r image:=/zed/zed_node/rgb/color/rect/image
and observed similar flickering/artifacts there as well.
Therefore, the issue does not appear to be limited to RQt Image View.
Environment
- Camera: ZED 2
- OS: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
- ROS 2: Jazzy
- Kernel: 6.17.0-29-generic
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090
- NVIDIA Driver: 595.71.05
- CUDA: 13.2
- ZED SDK: 5.1.0
- ZED ROS 2 Wrapper commit:
4719db300730c609efb6f6661a5d3d3fccb58bb7
Diagnostics
- Camera detected correctly
- USB 3.0
- USB bandwidth reported as OK
The ZED Diagnostic tool reports multiple CUDA installations:
- CUDA 13.2
- CUDA 12.6
and recommends keeping only CUDA 13.
Rosbag
I recorded a rosbag while reproducing the issue:
Bag details:
- Topic:
/zed/zed_node/rgb/color/rect/image - Duration: ~3 seconds
- Messages: 85
- Approximate frame rate: ~29 FPS
Question
Since the image stream is stable in ZED Explorer but shows artifacts when viewed through ROS 2 topics, what additional diagnostics would you recommend to determine whether the issue originates from:
- The ROS 2 wrapper
- ROS 2 image transport
- DDS/QoS configuration
- GPU/OpenGL rendering
- Another component in the ROS visualization pipeline
Thank you.