I am writing a ParaView version 5.1.2 plugin in C++ to visualize point cloud data produced by a LiDAR sensor. I noticed that Velodyne has an open source ParaView custom application to visualize their LiDAR data called Veloview. I tweaked some of their code to start but I am stuck now.
So far I wrote a reader that takes a pcap file and renders a point cloud that can be played back frame by frame. I also wrote a ParaView source that listens on a port and captures udp packets and after they are captured uses the reader to split them into frames and visualize the PC.
Now I would like to take live udp packets and render the point cloud in real time as each frame is completed.
I am having trouble accomplishing this because of the ParaView plugin structure. Currently, my reader displays a frame when the method RequestData is called. My method looks something like this.
int RequestData(vtkInformation *request, vtkInformationVector **inputVector, vtkInformationVector *outputVector){
vtkPolyData* output = vtkPolyData::GetData(outputVector);
vtkInformation* info = outputVector->GetInformationObject(0);
int timestep = 0;
if (info->Has(vtkStreamingDemandDrivenPipeline::UPDATE_TIME_STEP()))
{
double timeRequest = info->Get(vtkStreamingDemandDrivenPipeline::UPDATE_TIME_STEP());
int length = info->Length(vtkStreamingDemandDrivenPipeline::TIME_STEPS());
timestep = static_cast<int>(floor(timeRequest + 0.5));
}
this->Open();
// GetFrame returns a vtkSmartPointer<vtkPolyData> that is the frame
output->ShallowCopy(this->GetFrame(timestep));
this->Close();
return 1;
}
The RequestData method is called every time the timestep is updated in the ParaView gui. Then the frame from that timestep is copied into the outputVector.
I am not sure how to implement this with live data because in that circumstance the RequestData method is not called because no timesteps are requested. I saw there is a way to keep RequestData executing by using CONTINUE_EXECUTING() in this way.
request->Set(vtkStreamingDemandDrivenPipeline::CONTINUE_EXECUTING(), 1);
But I do not know if that is supposed to be used to visualize live data.
For now I am interested in simply reading live packets and throwing them away as soon as their frame is rendered. Does anyone know how to achieve this?