usb_cam low FPS from webcam

Question

Hello, I found out I can use usb_cam to publish images from my webcam. I tested it with my laptop's webcam and it performs poorly, only 7 FPS.

OS: Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric

ROS: Electric (installed via apt-get)

dmesg output regarding webcam:

[ 7209.629430] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 3 [ 7211.188071] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device number 6 using ehci_hcd [ 7211.383400] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device CNF7231 (04f2:b073) [ 7211.395092] input: CNF7231 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/input/input11

I downloaded http://www.ros.org/wiki/usb_cam and compiled it using rosmake. Compilation log: http://pastebin.com/rJYMR0Bw

As you can see it complains about libswscale (although I have it installed) but it managed to compile it.

Starting usb_cam gives the following output: http://pastebin.com/6JQ2CSpP

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

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Originally posted by Rosia Nicolae on ROS Answers with karma: 91 on 2011-12-03

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Mac on 2012-02-16:
Have you tried other webcam software? Webcam support in linux is...spotty...at best. Do guvcview, or cheese, or similar, give you better behavior? It's not necessarily ROS' fault...

Answer 1

Maybe you can try another pixel format, my launch file for my usb webcam looks like this:

<launch>
  <node name="usb_cam" pkg="usb_cam" type="usb_cam_node">
    <param name="video_device" value="/dev/video0" />
    <param name="image_width" value="640" />
    <param name="image_height" value="480" />
    <param name="pixel_format" value="yuyv" />
    <param name="camera_frame_id" value="usb_cam" />
    <param name="io_method" value="mmap" />
  </node>

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Originally posted by Stephan with karma: 1924 on 2012-02-16

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

Answer 2

You can also try with: http://www.ros.org/wiki/uvc_camera This one has a~fps parameter to set the framerate.

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Originally posted by Thomas with karma: 4478 on 2012-02-16

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2