Firewire camera control from Igor Pro

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Wed, 12/08/2010 - 09:20 am

I think that a useful addition to Igor's toolbox would be an XOP to control all FireWire video cameras that comply with the DCAM/IIDC specification. This includes a wide range of cameras from an international list of vendors, including C-Cam, Cohu, Dage, Basler, Point Grey, etc.

Analogous functionality using a C library is available from companies like Unibrain, but for those of us who prefer Igor (and may be programming-challenged) the ability to use our favorite application could be further extended. I am thinking along the lines of having some higher-level operations that incorporate a lot of lower-level functions, plus an extensive library of low-level functions. The goal would be to acquire and display camera imagery in Igor's windows that could be easily modified and analysed with existing Igor commands.

This may be beyond the scope of Wavemetrics' priorities, but I hope that some skilled and ambitious users, or even a company that might market such a product, would find this a worthwhile project. Perhaps Wavemetrics might even consider this as a purchased add-on product, like their NIDAQ mx Tools, or filter designer.

I am aware that MathWorks (maker of MATLAB) sells an Image Acquisition Toolbax with this capability, but I would never replace Igor with MATLAB, having previously compared them.
AG,

Thanks for the suggestion, and subsequent off-line correspondence. For the benefit of the Exchange audience, I will summarize my conclusions.

While the OCV XOP is a useful tool, it does not meet our requirements for some of the more esoteric settings expected from DCAM-compliant cameras. Of particular value to me is the ability to set a limiting Region-of-Interest (ROI), to limit the image data to only the required field. This is also necessary to get the fastest possible frame rate, and minimize storage requirements for saved data. Other requirements such as external triggering and trigger-width-controlled exposure times could be implemented in the OCV XOP, but might require some modification of it.

I am still hoping for a solution whereby I could program with Igor operations or functions derived from the DCAM specification.

Stephen R. Chinn

December 9, 2010 at 11:45 am - Permalink