ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Publishing and subscribing images using image_transport

ROS image transport is very similar to ROS Publishers and Subscribers and it is used to publish/subscribe the images along with the camera information. We can publish the image data using ros::Publishers, but image transport is a more efficient way of sending the image data.

The image transport APIs are provided by the image_transport package. Using these APIs, we can transport an image in different compression formats; for example, we can transport it as an uncompressed image, JPEG/PNG compression, or Theora compression in separate Topics. We can also add different transport formats by adding plugins. By default, we can see the compressed and Theora transports.

 image_transport::ImageTransport ...