@Rowan-Dempster ,
Please see the following commit where we recently enabled publishing the normalized frame from IMX412 and IMX664 camera via regular and ION buffers: https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-camera-server/-/commit/c42e2febbc6370f9bbc95aff0659718656af6906
The parameters for 1996x1520 look good, basically you will be getting 2x2 binned (full frame) and then further down-scale to 998x760. since you are doing exact 2x2 downscale in misp, you can also remove interpolation, which will make the image a bit sharper, you can see this for reference: link -- basically change the sampler filter mode from linear (interpolate) to nearest. If you use non-integer down-sample, keep the linear interpolation.
Regarding the resolution to use with VIO.. i think the 998x760 with nearest sampling should behave the same or better than AR0144 with 1280x800 resolution, mainly because the IMX412 has a much bigger lens (while still being pretty wide), so image quality is going to be better (of course, you need to calibrate intrinsics). Also the 4:3 aspect ratio may help capture more features in the vertical direction. That of course does not account for rolling shutter effects..
There can definitely be benefit in going up in resolution and using 1996x1520, but you kind of have to use the extra resolution correctly.. typically you would detect features on lower resolution image and then refine using the full resolution (also for tracking features). However, in practice, often some small blur is applied to the image to get rid of pixel noise, etc, so very fine features won't get picked up. Unfortunately, we do not know exactly what QVIO does internally. it may do some kind of pyramidal image decomposition to do these things in a smart way. You should try it and check the cpu usage.
Using MISP you can downsample and crop (while maintaining aspect ratio) to any resolution, so it's easy to experiment.
If i had to test QVIO at different resolutions, i would log raw bayer images and imu data using voxl-logger and then use voxl-replay + offline misp + offline qvio to run tests on the same data sets with different processing parameters. This may sound complicated, but it's really not:
voxl-logger can log raw10 frames (on this branch) :
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-logger/-/tree/extend-cam-logging
qvio relies on timestamps from incoming messages, so it can work with live data or playback data
the only missing piece is offline MISP implementation, which is partially available in this tool :
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-mpa-tools/-/blob/add-new-image-tools/tools/voxl-convert-image.cpp -- and we are working on being able to run exactly the same implementation as in camera-server. The only missing piece in the code listed here is AWB -- however, white balance should not affect VIO too much, since only Y channel is used, so you can set white balance gains to a fixed value.
running misp offline allows you to experiment with different resolutions / processing directly from the source raw10 bayer image (lossless)
So, if you are really serious about using hires camera for QVIO, since there are a lot of unknowns, you should consider setting up an offline processing pipeline, so that you can run repeatable tests and parameter sweeps. It requires some upfront work, but the pay-off will be significant. You can also use the offline pipeline for regression testing of performance and comparing to other VIO algorithms (which just need the MPA interface). We can discuss this topic more, if you are interested.
imx412_fpv_eis_20250919_drivers.zip are the latest for IMX412. We should really make them default ones shipped in the VOXL2 SDK, but we have not done it.
Since you are maintaining your own version of voxl-camera-server, you should add them to your voxl-camera-server repo and .deb and install them somewhere like /usr/share/modalai/voxl-camera-server/drivers. then modify the voxl-configure-camera script to first look for imx412 drivers in that folder and then fallback to searching /usr/share/modalai/chi-cdk/. In fact this is something I am considering, as maintaining camera drivers in the core system image is less flexible.
EDIT: i guess the older version of the imx412 drivers are already in the repo, so you can just replace them with new ones in your camera server repo: link
Let me know if you have any more questions. Sounds like a fun project 🙂
Alex
