ROS 2 Libcamera Video Stream

This project provides a ROS 2 package for capturing video streams using libcamera and publishing them as ROS 2 topics. It was tested using ROS2 Jazzy installed on a Raspberry Pi 5.

---

Features

• Captures video using libcamera-vid.
• Publishes both raw (sensor_msgs/msg/Image) and compressed (sensor_msgs/msg/CompressedImage) frames.

---

Installation

Setup

git clone https://github.com/igillespie/ros2_libcamera_video_stream.git
cd ros2_libcamera_video_stream

pip install  opencv-python cv-bridge

source /opt/ros/<ros-distro>/setup.bash  # Replace <ros-distro> with your ROS 2 distribution (e.g., humble, rolling, etc.)
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

ros2 run video_stream video_publisher

Or if you want to pass specific arguments:

ros2 run video_stream video_publisher --ros-args -p codec:=mjpeg -p width:=640 -p height:=480 -p fps:=15

Topics

The node publishes video frames on the following topics:

Topic	Message Type	Description
/video_frames	sensor_msgs/msg/Image	Publishes raw video frames with uncompressed pixel data for processing.
/video_frames/compressed	sensor_msgs/msg/CompressedImage	Publishes compressed video frames (JPEG) for bandwidth-efficient streaming.