Help needed in extraction of Depth Map from Basilisk Instrument Camera

[ankitdipto]

Hello Basilisk community,

First of all, I would like to thank you all for building and open-sourcing such a fantastic astrodynamics simulator! I am currently working on a project related to some space application. We are using Basilisk along with Vizard for our research. So far, we have been successful in simulating a custom scenario for our use-case but we are stuck while processing the depth maps from images captured during the simulation.

For your context, we passed the parameter renderMode = 1 and renderRate = 10 to createCameraConfigMsg(). Once the images captured by the camera were saved in the home folder, we processed them offline as described here.

However, to our surprise the processed images don't look like depth maps. I am attaching a sample for your reference!

Moreover, you can find the notebook we used to process the above image here.

[ankitdipto]

It would be great if Prof @schaubh could share some insights!

[schaubh]

This depth map mode is a recent feature. I'll ask my Unity develop to comment on your question, but she is on travel for a week.

[schaubh]

At first glance, I'm assuming the gray scale image is your processed depth map. Why is the earth included there, did you include a very large farClippingPlane value? Given the finite digits of precision on a GPU float, the near object would show up as having zero depth in that case.

[ankitdipto]

Yes, you are right. The gray-scale image is the depth map. I have not explicitly set the values of near and far clipping planes. I assume that those values are 0.1 and 100 by default (read that in the documentation).

[woodj80]

Hi! The original image that you provided looks like a regular visible image, not a depth map. For reference, here is a depth map image from a test file:

The image above was created with a camera using the following camera parameters:

You can check your camera's setup by looking at the VizMessage log (under Vizard's View menu). You can also check the Console log (also under Vizard's View menu) in case there is an error message displayed. If you can provide screenshots of both the camera setup message and the console log, I can help you debug further. Thanks!