What Is a Surface?
The surface is a container where a 2D image can be stored. In most situations, the surface is a buffer in the host memory. Other types of surfaces may be defined, such as the hardware frame buffer located inside a frame grabber. In the particular case of a line-scan camera, the surface can be used as a circular buffer. This implies that, although the surface is 2D-limited, the incoming data flow is continuous and virtually unlimited.
Regarding the acquisition process, the surface is the destination where the grabbed images from the cameras are recorded. The overall goal of the MultiCam driver is to provide flexible channels to route images coming from a camera towards a specified surface.
Surface creation
The Surface class groups all MultiCam parameters dedicated to the definition of memory buffers for image or data storage. A Surface object is an instance of the Surface class represented by a dedicated set of such parameters that uniquely describe the surface.
Several surfaces can exist simultaneously. A process called "surface creation" is applied to define a new surface. A created surface is entirely characterized by a corresponding instance of the Surface class in the MultiCam environment.
Surfaces can be deleted by their owning application with an appropriate API function.