ZED SDK 0.9.3 Brings Performance Improvements and More

We are excited to announce the release of ZED SDK version 0.9.3! This new update of the ZED SDK brings significant performance and usability improvements, along with support for our new factory calibration technology.

The 0.9.3 release includes the following improvements:

• Significant performance improvement on PC, Tegra K1 and X1 mobile/embedded system-on-a-chip
• General usability improvements, including a background process for self-calibration
• Support for CUDA 7.5
• Support for ZED new factory calibration technology
• Improved depth map filtering in saturated areas
• Many improvements to the ZED tools and samples

New Architecture and Higher Performance

With the number of ZED users growing significantly in the past few months, we’ve been expanding the development team to prepare the release of significant software updates in 2016. We started the year with a brand-new architecture for the ZED SDK that introduces great performance and stability improvements and allows us to push toward shorter release cycles.

The 0.9.3 release brings up to 40% faster depth computation on lower performance graphics chip, including embedded system-on-a-chip such as Tegra K1 or X1. On these platforms, latency has been dramatically reduced when using CPU retrieve functions. These improvements now make the ZED and Tegra one of the most powerful platform for development of embedded computer vision applications.

General Usability Improvements

The new update brings several usability improvements. The initialization of the camera which includes self-calibration is now run as a non-blocking background process. This makes using the ZED much easier as self-calibration does not need to be successful in order to use the camera. If self-calibration is not successful, the SDK will use the default factory calibration.

User interface to record and playback SVO and snapshots has also been improved, and ZED Explorer and Settings App have been merged. The ZED Explorer is now the app to use when you want to adjust your camera controls and calibration settings.

Finally, we’ve also reduced depth flicker in saturated areas by detecting and filtering those areas.

Support for CUDA 7.5

ZED SDK 0.9.3 brings full support for CUDA 7.5 on Windows and Linux, which will simplify the SDK integration in applications using the latest version of CUDA.

New Factory Calibration

Accurate camera calibration is one of the biggest challenges in building a long-range depth sensor. It is very difficult to calibrate a 3D camera with a high accuracy in both the near and far range and in the corners of the picture. At Stereolabs, we’ve been working on improving our calibration process since early 2015, and we now have a brand new stereo calibration process set up at our factory.

This new process brings great improvements in depth accuracy in the far range and in the corners of the image. You can also expect a consistent behavior across all ZED cameras. Cameras shipped after the 1^st February 2016 will benefit from this new calibration process. For our other users, we will release a recalibration app with the next update that will let you reach similar results with your ZED.

Download the ZED SDK 0.9.3 Release Today!

ZED SDK 0.9.3 for Windows and Linux is now available for download on our Developer page. Our team is very excited to bring this release as a stepping-stone for the work we have set out for 2016!