Introducing the Intel RealSense Driver for Linux & OS X

Until recently, the capabilities of the Intel RealSense technology were available only to Windows users, support for other operating systems was completely absent, which, of course, upset the people who used them. Now this injustice is corrected, at least in part. As part of its open source program, Intel published the RealSense for Linux & OS X driver , providing:

• image acquisition from all models of RealSense cameras (F200, SR300, and R200), including from several sources at once;
• access to raw RGB, depth and IR streams;
• access to synthetic streams (depth equalized in color, etc.);
• access to internal and external calibration information;
• implementation of most of the hardware-specific functionality (UVC XU).

The driver was developed and tested on Ubuntu OS 14.04.03 x64 with an updated 4.4 and GCC 4.9 kernel, as well as OS X 10.8. with Clang. librealsense provides compatibility with the Robotic Operating System (ROS), OpenCV, Point Cloud Library (PCL) and many other runtime and frameworks. The main features of the library are accelerated using SSE3 instructions. librealsense communicates with cameras directly via UVC and USB without using RealSense SDK runtimes. Most of the code is platform-independent, but there is a small layer of abstraction based on the UVC components of the OS. The library has two external dependencies: GLFW3 (on all platforms) and libusb-1.0 (Mac / Linux),