ZED Mini Stereo Camera

ZED Mini Camera : The difference between looking at the virtual world from afar and being in it!

ZED Cameras

ZED Cameras is a stereo camera for autonomous navigation and AR (augmented reality) applications. Depth perception is very important for these applications and the ZED brand imitates the human vision structure at this point. Stereolabs has tackled multiple AR problems with ZED cameras: these are positional tracking and the acquisition of desired quality 3D images in open space.

ZED Cameras simply attach to a drone, unmanned aerial vehicle, car or robot and give these structures a depth perception along with a 3D image! ZED does not work with IR or laser light (projection method)! There are only two VGA cameras. These cameras talk to an external GPU and Stereolab's special software extracts the depth information (stereovision) from the small pixel difference between the images given by the right and left camera. This also solves the problem of positional tracking of the user in the 3D image.

ZED does not do all the work itself, it sends the data (video images) to the host computer where it is installed. To achieve the desired performance, Stereolabs recommends "CUDA-capable" computers with NVIDA graphics card (especially the NVIDA Jetson TK1 with small size CPU-GPU and 3D Stereo processing).

What more can be done with ZED: 3D images and objects can be captured and added to computer animations and renders, detailed 3D images of objects can be obtained and printed on a 3D printer. 3D video conferencing can be arranged for a community where participants wear HMD (Head Mounted Displays) such as Oculus Rift or count the number of people in a crowd!

Using next-generation visual inertial odometry technology, inertial measurements are combined with visual data from the stereo camera at 800Hz. The ZED Mini features a beautiful black design with a heat and shock resistant aluminum frame that maintains detection quality over time and maintains factory calibration. A new USB Type-C port integrates video output and power into a single connector, delivering up to 3Gb/s data at the lowest latency.

Difference Between ZED Mini and ZED Stereo Camera!

ZED Mini and ZED use the same SDK. Therefore, another ZED can easily be used in a project realized with one camera! Both cameras use the same RGB sensors and therefore provide the same resolutions and frame rates: 100 images per second in VGA and a maximum resolution of 2K per image at 15 fps.


The main differences between the two structures are:

o  ZED mini also has IMU sensor. It provides further tracking by combining mini visual odometry data with data from the IMU sensor.
o  On the ZED mini, the distance between the two cameras is 63mm, while on the ZED this distance is 120mm. Accordingly, while the ZED can detect depth between 30cm and 20m, it can be done between 15cm and 12m with ZED mini.