ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Publishing images with ImageTransport

We can publish single images with ros::Publisher, but it is better to use an image_transport publisher. It can publish images with their corresponding camera information. That is exactly what we did for the camera driver previously. The image_transport API is useful for providing different transport formats in a seamless way. The images you publish actually appear in several topics. Apart from the basic, uncompressed one, you will see a compressed one or even more. The number of supported transports depends on the plugins installed in your system; you will usually have the compressed and theora transports.

You can see this with rostopic info. In order to install all the plugins, use the following command: ...