OAK vs RealSense™
Compared to RealSense™ stereo cameras, the DepthAI platform adds a ton of on-device features (custom AI modes, tracking, scripting, encoding etc.) to OAK cameras and can be used in embedded applications (Embedded use-case).Depth comparison
From our own evaluation, we have found out that our OAK-D-Pro camera has a slighly better depth accuracy compared to RealSense™ D435i / D455. For more information, please see:3rd party evaluation
A third party (customer) sent us their OAK evaluation results, comparing OAK-D Pro with RealSense™ D435i.

Custom stereo depth perception
Our platform was built from the ground up with the idea of being customizable. All of our products based on OAK-SoM are open-source so you can easily redesign the board (see Integrating DepthAI into products), for example to change the stereo baseline distance or use a different image sensor (we support a bunch of different sensors).OAK FFC line is great for prototyping, as it allows users to use different camera sensors/optics and place them at an ideal stereo baseline distance for their application.Below is a long-range disparity depth visualized over a color frame. This customer used narrow FOV M12 lenses with wide stereo baseline distance (25cm) to achieve such results with our platform.
On-device feature comparison
On-Device Capabilities | OAK-D Pro | OAK-D S2 | OAK-D Lite | L515 | D415 | D430-D435 | D450-D455 | F455 | F450 | T261-T265 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Custom AI models | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Object detection | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Object tracking | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
On-device scripting | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Video/Image Encoding | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Image Manipulation | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Skeleton/Hand Tracking | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
3D Semantic Segmentation | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
3D Object Pose Estimation | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
3D Edge Detection | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Feature Tracking | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
3D Feature Tracking | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
OCR | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Face Recognition | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ |
Encryption | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ |
Features described
- Custom AI models - You can run any AI/NN model(s) on the device, as long as all layers are supported. You can also choose from 200+ pretrained NN models from Open Model Zoo and DepthAI Model Zoo.
- Object detection - Most popular object detectors have been converted and run on our devices. DepthAI supports onboard decoding of Yolo and MobileNet based NN models.
- Object tracking - ObjectTracker node comes with 4 tracker types, and it also supports tracking of objects in 3D space.
- On-device scripting - Script node enables users to run custom Python 3.9 scripts that will run on the device, used for managing the flow of the pipeline (business logic).
- Video/Image encoding - VideoEncoder node allows encoding into MJPEG, H265, or H264 formats.
- Image Manipulation - ImageManip node allows users to resize, warp, crop, flip, and thumbnail image frames and do type conversions (YUV420, NV12, RGB, etc.)
- Skeleton/Hand Tracking - Detect and track key points of a hand or human pose. Geaxgx's demos: Hand tracker, Blazepose, Movenet.
- 3D Semantic segmentation - Perceive the world with semantically-labeled pixels. DeeplabV3 demo here.
- 3D Object Pose Estimation - MediaPipe's Objectron has been converted to run on OAK cameras. Video here.
- 3D Edge Detection - EdgeDetector node uses Sobel filter to detect edges. With depth information, you can get physical position of these edges.
- Feature Tracking - FeatureTracker node detects and tracks key points (features).
- 3D Feature Tracking - With depth information, you can track these features in physical space.
- OCR - Optical character recognition, demo here.
- Face Recognition - Demo here, which runs face detection, alignment, and face recognition (3 different NN models) on the device simultaneously.
- Encryption - Not yet addressed.
Camera specification
Specification | OAK-D Pro / -W | OAK-D S2 / -W | OAK-D Lite | OAK-D SR PoE | L515 | D415 | D430-D435 | D450-D455 | F455 | F450 | T261-T265 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
RGB | IMX378 | IMX378/OV9782 | IMX214 | OV9782 | OV2740 | OV2740 | OV2740 | OV9782 | N/A | N/A | - |
RGB HFOV | 69 / 109 | 69 / 109 | 73.6 | 80 | 80 | 69 | 69 | 90 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
RGB Shutter | Rolling / Global | Rolling | Rolling | Global | Rolling | Rolling | Rolling | Global | N/A | N/A | N/A |
RGB resolution | 12MP | 12MP | 13MP | 1MP | 2MP | 2MP | 2MP | 1MP | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Depth Type | Active Stereo | Passive Stereo | Passive Stereo | Active Stereo + ToF | ToF | Active Stereo | Active Stereo | Active Stereo | Active Stereo | Active Stereo | N/A |
Depth sensor | OV9282 | OV9282 | OV7251 | OV9782 + ToF | - | OV2740 | OV9282 | OV9782 | - | - | - |
Stereo Shutter | Global | Global | Global | Global | Rolling | Global | Global | Global | |||
Depth HFOV | 72 / 127 | 72 / 127 | 72 | 70 | N/A | 70 | 87 | 87 | 56 | 56 | 173 |
Min Depth | 20 cm | 20 cm | 20 cm | 20 cm | 25 cm | 45 cm | 28 cm | 52 cm | 30 cm | 30 cm | N/A |
Depth resolution | 1280x800 | 1280x800 | 640x480 | 1280x800 | N/A | 1024x768 | 1280x720 | 1280x720 | 848x800 | ||
IR LED | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
ToF | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
IMU | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ✔️/❌ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |