Rviz Annotator is a ROS package that integrates rosbag player into rviz plugins for playing and annotating recorded PointCloud2 messages. The user can select points displayed in rviz for manual object clusters naming and export a new .bag file. It contains three rviz plugins:

• Rosbag player
• Annotation panel
• PointCloud2 selection tool (using PointCloud2_Segments custom messages)

The following ROS packages are used for recording their output:

• Lasersacn Stacker
• PointCloud2 Clustering
• PointCloud2 Tracking
• PointCloud2 Segments Viz
• HPR

yaml-cpp library is also needed for YAML support. (Normally it is pre-installed with ROS)

Build with catkin_make install under catkin workspace.

1. Open plugin_params.yaml in the config directory to set default parameters:

   • sel_topic: topic for publishing selected points message
   • marker_array_topic: topic for publishing marker array
   • csv_name: name of the output .csv file after rviz save (Ctrl + S only )
   • csv_dir: location of the output .csv file
   • bagfiles_dir: directory containing .bag files
   • pc_segments_topic: subscriber PointCloud2_Segments topic
   • pc2_topic: subscriber PointCloud2 topic

2. Open rviz and add RosbagPlayer panel, Annotation panel and PointSelect tool

3. Under player panel, select a directory that contains .bag files and, under annotation panel, type PointCloud2 topic to subscribe to, or refresh to update open topics and select from the list

4. Add MarkerArray display to see annotated points

Start player by pressing Start.
Activate PointSelect ( s key for shortcut) tool to select points on a specific frame, after pressing Pause button.

Annotation panel shows selection status, depending on the initial clustering ( Clean for points that belong to the same cluster/object or Dirty for different clusters). Hit Join to create custom cluster or Divide to separate points from previous custom cluster. Type cluster name to set it and markers visualize the created clusters ( MarkerArray display should be active).

Holding << or >> down steps continuously backwards or forward while paused.

Hit Ctrl + S to save annotated points to csv when done.

Run rosrun rviz_annotator exportBag <initial_bagfile_name> to export a new .bag file containing annotations.

Each custom cluster in the new .bag has its own color. Clusters that have not been selected manually are displayed grayed out.

The exporter node gives generated colors to annotated points and gray color to the rest for each frame.
It needs to take the original cluster id's into account retaining their color and adding the annotated points with new id's.

Rosbag player has backwards step as an extra feature, but does not support all the original player features.

SyncTopics option of the player must be checked always before performing Backstep and Step ( << and >> ).

The name of the package ( rviz_annotator ) should not be changed, because it causes run-time errors.

The format of directory parameters must be path/to/file and topic/name for topic parameters (no / on the end).

Currently only C++11 compiler is supported. Tested on ros-kinetic version.