rviz - storing point cloud selection

Question

Hi,

using the "select" tool in rviz you can easily select points from a point cloud. The selected points will then show up in the selection panel.

My question is: Is there any possibility to export this selection? E.g. store the indices in a file? Or republish them on a different topic?

The reason is I would like to manually segment a point cloud in rviz in order to provide ground truth for comparing it to a segmentation algorithm.

I believe one idea would be to write an rviz plug-in for this. But I wonder, whether somebody has already stumbled upon this problem and found an easy solution (less hacky than http://answers.ros.org/question/12806/interactively-access-to-laser-point-in-rviz/)?

Best, Sebastian

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Originally posted by sebastianh on ROS Answers with karma: 70 on 2013-11-11

Post score: 3

Answer 1

Hello,

finally we wrote a plugin, as there is no such feature in RVIZ. It provides a new tool that inherits all features of the default 'select' tool and additionally publishes all selected points on the ros topic '/selected_points'.

It can be found at: https://github.com/tu-rbo/turbo-ros-pkg

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Originally posted by pBartels with karma: 76 on 2013-11-24

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 4

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Original comments

Comment by MSD on 2015-07-23:
hi pBartels! Can you share the link to your usefull plugin please? The old link is not working.

Thank you!

Comment by Rasoul on 2015-07-30:
You can use the following link: https://github.com/tu-rbo/turbo-ros-pkg

Comment by hndrk on 2017-10-04:
Hi, just implemented the plugin, but crashes upon doing the selection printing some storage-access-failure in the terminal. Anybody got an idea? I'm running ROS kinetic 1.12.7 thx in advance ^^

Answer 2

There is no such direct method for point cloud selection in the RVIZ itself as far as I know. But, there is a open source annotation tool called "LabelMe" available for labeling the point cloud. This toolbox is created by CSAIL MIT lab and widely used by many people for providing ground truth values for segmentation problem.

LabelMe3D Toolbox link to website

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Originally posted by sudhanshu_mittal with karma: 311 on 2013-11-12

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

Answer 3

Go to the Top menu in RVIZ and click on Panels. Under the Panels, tick Selection. Once Selection is enabled, it adds a new Panel called Selection. Then on the RVIZ gui press on select option which is beside Move Camera option.

Then whatever points you select on the point cloud will displayed in the Selection panel.

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Originally posted by sai with karma: 1935 on 2017-05-08

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1