Kinect RGB image showing all black after running for a few hours

[jbohren]

This is something I haven't seen before, and seems to have only started happening recently. Basically after running a kinect for a while, the rgb image starts appearing all black (all zeros, not NaNs like in #13, also this is on a 64bit machine). The point cloud still looks perfect, but the color information is all gone. It then flickers with a single (or partial) frame every few seconds. I'm running on Ubuntu 12.04 64bit / Hydro / openni_camera version 1.9.2 / libopenni-sensor-primesense0 5.1.0.41-2+precise1.

Bag file here: http://media.jbohren.com/bad_kinect_rgb.bag

[jbohren]

Also this is happening with multiple devices.

[jonbinney]

At willow we started seeing this with the kinects. It was a hoooooorribly hard to track down error. We would see some images that were black at the top, and then the black region would grow (and it would flicker). Eventually the images would be all black. We only saw this on certain PR2s, and only after running them for a loooong time. We suspected a locking bug in the underlying openni library, or in openni_camera, but I don't think we ever found a good fix. We just swaped the kinects for asus xtion's :-(

[jbohren]

Something else that I noticed that was strange is that the bad kinect is reporting serial number 0000000000000000 did you see anything similar?

[jbohren]

This also affects the depth image, and is still broken. Switching to freenect instead.