Stream of Cloud Point Visualization using PCL

Khaled picture Khaled · Jan 25, 2012 · Viewed 10.4k times · Source

I am doing some processing on RGB and Depth data and constructing cloud points that are to be visualized, I currently use PCL Visualizer and it works fine. I want to have the visualizer in a different thread (real time so it will redraw the global cloud point, I tried boost threads but I get a runtime error "VTK bad lookup table"

Anyone knows how to visualize stream of cloud points in a different thread ?

Answer

Khaled picture Khaled · Jan 26, 2012

OK, I got it to work now, maybe I did something wrong before, here is how I did it using boost threads and mutex

    bool update;
    boost::mutex updateModelMutex;
    pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZRGB>::Ptr cloud (new pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZRGB>);

    void visualize()  
    {  
        // prepare visualizer named "viewer"

        while (!viewer->wasStopped ())
        {
            viewer->spinOnce (100);
            // Get lock on the boolean update and check if cloud was updated
            boost::mutex::scoped_lock updateLock(updateModelMutex);
            if(update)
            {
                if(!viewer->updatePointCloud(cloud, "sample cloud"))
                  viewer->addPointCloud(cloud, colorHandler, "sample cloud");
                update = false;
            }
            updateLock.unlock();

        }   
   }  


    int main()
    {
        //Start visualizer thread
        boost::thread workerThread(visualize); 

        while(notFinishedProcessing)
        {
           boost::mutex::scoped_lock updateLock(updateModelMutex);
          update = true;
          // do processing on cloud
           updateLock.unlock();

        }
        workerThread.join();  
    }

UPDATE:

According to this page The reason is that adding an empty point cloud to the visualizer causes things to go crazy so I edited the code above