Isaac ROS Argus Camera freezes when viewing image topic from remote RViz (also affects custom GStreamer node)

[rodrigo_fr]

Hi everyone,

I’m working with Isaac ROS Argus Camera following the official documentation:

isaac_ros_argus_camera — isaac_ros_docs documentation

The camera works perfectly when visualizing the image in RViz running locally on the Jetson.
However, I’m running into a strange issue when trying to view the camera feed from RViz running on another computer on the same network (with the Jetson Orin as the ROS 2 host):

✅ Steps to reproduce:

1. Set up isaac_ros_argus_camera on a Jetson device according to the official documentation.
2. Launch rviz2 on the Jetson and visualize the camera topic – it works fine.
3. On another computer (same ROS_DOMAIN_ID, connected over LAN), launch rviz2 and subscribe to the same image topic.
4. After receiving a single frame on the remote rviz2, both the local and remote RViz freeze, and the camera node stops publishing.
5. As soon as I disable the image display in the remote RViz, the stream immediately resumes on both sides and the camera node starts publishing again.

❌ Observed behavior:

• When everything is working normally, the timestamps on the image frames update continuously.
• As soon as a remote RViz subscribes, the timestamps stop advancing (indicating the publisher has stopped).
• The node output shows repeated warnings like these, but note that these also appear even when visualizing locally (and the stream still flows normally):

[component_container_mt-1] 2025-07-17 19:23:17.807 WARN  extensions/hawk/components/argus_camera.cpp@1735: Frame drop in module_id 0 camera_id 0
[component_container_mt-1] 2025-07-17 19:23:17.854 WARN  extensions/hawk/components/argus_camera.cpp@1735: Frame drop in module_id 0 camera_id 0

• This exact behavior (publishing stops when a remote subscriber connects) also happens with a custom node using a GStreamer pipeline, so it seems related to the transport or subscription handling rather than the Argus camera specifically.

Has anyone else experienced this issue?
Do you know what could cause a publisher (Argus or GStreamer) to stop sending frames when a remote RViz subscribes over the network?
Any tips on how to gather more detailed logs or debug this behavior would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your guidance!

[rodrigo_fr]

I just found two new achievements gstreamer works with a low fps (lower than jetson nano) and after making some changes to isaac_ros_argus_camera_mono_core.launch.py i have changed the mode of the camera to 4 and frame drop disappeared when visualizing locally, visualizing remotely it runs about 2fps with some frame drops

[rodrigo_fr]

It turned out to be a newbie mistake on my side. Publishing image_raw directly was too much data over the network, and the bandwidth got saturated.

Solution:
I used image_transport on the Isaac ROS Argus Camera to republish from raw to compressed. I also changed the camera mode to 3 or 4 by tweaking the launch file.

Important note:
If the Argus Camera node starts dropping frames, no other topic you subscribe to will receive any frames either. So make sure the mode and transport settings keep the stream stable.

Extra tip:
If you’re planning to use the Isaac ROS Image Encoder for H.264, keep in mind that on the Orin Nano this isn’t possible because it doesn’t have NVENC hardware. In my case, I just stick with simple image_transport for compression.