gtsam2mrpt_serial

A C++ library offering a GTSAM ⇆ mrpt-serialization bridge.

This library offers efficient, binary serialization of GTSAM data structures, including whole NonLinearFactorGraphs and Values. Storage format has the advantages of mrpt-serialization:

• Fast and efficient (binary storage by default).
• Binary files are portable between machine architectures, endianness, word size, and operative system (unlike Boost).
• Support for versioning, so future versions will be able to read old files.
• Automatic support for .gz compression via mrpt::io::CFileGZOutputStream.
• GTSAM objects can be serialized to/from any stream defined in mrpt-io, like TCP sockets, files, or pipes.

C++17 is required since that is the minimum C++ standard required by MRPT.

Dependencies

• MRPT: Install with sudo apt install libmrpt-dev (on Ubuntu 22.04 or newer) or otherwise see install instructions.
• GTSAM: Build from sources or install from the PPA.

Examples of use.

See gtsam2mrpt_serial/tests/main.cpp.

Performance

Simple performance profiling shows an average time cost of roughly 50% the native Boost binary serialization mechanism for mid-sized graphs.

The following quantitative analysis was done with this code, on an Ubuntu 20.04 (Boost 1.71, MRPT 2.4.4) and a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz CPU. Note that the time scale is logarithmic.