Most image processing programs are designed to start by loading an image from file. In contrast, Igor Pro^® provides facilities for acquiring images directly from a camera or a video source. This capability means that by using Igor Pro, you can often skip the steps involved in using two separate programs: one to control the acquisition and a second for image processing and data analysis.

Image acquisition is strongly hardware dependent. As such, it is often implemented through specific Igor plugins (XOPs), each tailored to the nuances of its camera’s interface. Before Igor Pro 7, WaveMetrics provided a number of XOPs that were based on prevailing image acquisition APIs for Windows and for Macintosh. Igor Pro 7, 8, and 9 include two operations that provide platform-independent support for integrated cameras and for USB cameras with appropriate drivers. However, most scientific cameras do not support this API, so they continue to require custom XOPs.

Beginning with Igor Pro 10, WaveMetrics is providing a new XOP, called MMI, which provides an interface, not to one specific camera, but to the open-source software platform called Micro-Manager. Micro-Manager in turn, provides interfaces to a wide range of cameras, from webcams to state-of-the-art scientific cameras. Working together, Igor Pro 10 and MMI provide a unified interface to the range of cameras (and other devices) supported by Micro-Manager. MMI and Micro-Manager also support streaming acquisition and, optionally, with simultaneous streaming direct to HDF5 files.

In addition to the options listed above, you can still use the XOP Toolkit to write your own custom XOP or purchase a custom XOP from a third party. If you choose to write your own XOP you can contact technical support (support@wavemetrics.com) to obtain sample code for image acquisition XOPs.

Image Acquisition Example

See the Image Acquisition Example in the gallery for an example of image acquisition using Igor.