Am I checking for a white pixel correctly?

Question

I am currently going through all the pixels in an image to determine what is a white pixel. I then have to decide where to drive the bot. I am also using sensor_msgs/Image.msg that I get from the /camera/rgb/image_raw channel.

However, I can't seem to locate any white image with the code but the RGBa values I set in my model in gazebo all have value 1 as shown in the image below the code .

I logged all my values(more than once) with ROS_INFO_STREAM but no values are 255, let alone 3 consecutive ones.

void process_image_callback(const sensor_msgs::Image img)
{
  const int white_pixel = 255;

  const int image_slice_width = img.step / 3;

  int j = 0;
  bool found = false;

  for (int i = 0; not found and i < img.height; i++) 
  {
    for (j; j < img.step-3; j += 3)
    {
      if (img.data[i*img.step + j] == white_pixel)
      {
      ROS_INFO_STREAM("img.data[i*img.step + (j + 0)]" + std::to_string(img.data[i*img.step + (j + 0)]));
      ROS_INFO_STREAM("img.data[i*img.step + (j + 1)]" + std::to_string(img.data[i*img.step + (j + 1)]));
      ROS_INFO_STREAM("img.data[i*img.step + (j + 2)]" + std::to_string(img.data[i*img.step + (j + 2)]));
      }
      // img.data only has one index
      if (img.data[i*img.step +  j     ] == white_pixel and
          img.data[i*img.step + (j + 1)] == white_pixel and
          img.data[i*img.step + (j + 2)] == white_pixel)
      {
          found = true;
          break;
      }
    }
    ROS_INFO_STREAM("End of j loop");
  }

  if (found)
  {
    // go left, forward or right
  }
  else
  {
    // no white pixel seen so stop the bot
  }
}

Answer 1

You said:

the RGBa values I set in my model in gazebo all have value 1

and you also said:

but no values are 255

Which I would expect is correct, because you just said you set them all to 1. Did you mean to scale them from 1 to 255 at some point? Casting 1.0 from float to uint8 will give you 1, not 255.

Answer 2

It looks like there might be a bug in your code as pointed to by @MorganStark47 above in the comment

You may also want to use Gazebo/White as the material versus Gazebo/Grey to get the full brightness. I think the settings your adjusting effect how it interacts with different light sources and may not fully override the texture which a grey will take off some of the brightness.

There's a list here: http://wiki.ros.org/simulator_gazebo/Tutorials/ListOfMaterials