Robotic datasets are important for scientific benchmarking and developing algorithms, for example for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Modern robotic datasets feature video data of high resolution and high framerates. Storing and sharing those datasets becomes thus very costly, especially if more than one camera is used for the datasets. It is thus essential to store this video data in a compressed format. This paper investigates the use of modern video encoders for robotic datasets. We provide a software that can replay mp4 videos within ROS 1 and ROS 2 frameworks, supporting the synchronized playback in simulated time. Furthermore, the paper evaluates different encoders and their settings to find optimal configurations in terms of resulting size, quality and encoding time. Through this work we show that it is possible to store and share even highest quality video datasets within reasonable storage constraints.

翻译：机器人数据集对于科学基准测试和算法开发（例如同时定位与建图（SLAM））至关重要。现代机器人数据集具有高分辨率和高帧率的视频数据。因此，存储和共享这些数据集的成本变得非常高昂，尤其是在数据集中使用多个摄像头的情况下。因此，以压缩格式存储这些视频数据至关重要。本文研究了现代视频编码器在机器人数据集中的应用。我们提供了一款能够在ROS 1和ROS 2框架内回放mp4视频的软件，支持模拟时间下的同步播放。此外，本文评估了不同编码器及其设置，以在最终文件大小、质量和编码时间方面找到最优配置。通过这项工作，我们证明了即使在合理的存储限制下，也能存储和共享最高质量的视频数据集。