Area-Scan camera and System Relationship
The following figure is a conceptual view of the task an industrial frame grabber is in charge of. An area-scan camera and some part of the external system are considered.
This drawing addresses the most complex case. It may happen that the actual application involves only a part of the figured resources.
The external system determines that a scene is to be captured. It can be a moving object found to have reached the right location thanks to judicious position sensors.
The system sends a trigger pulse to the frame grabber. As a reaction, the frame grabber has the following mission:
- To adequately instruct the camera to capture the image as quickly as possible.
- To retrieve the image produced by the camera.
- To deposit the image in digital format into a memory location inside the computer hosting the frame grabber.
In response to the external trigger, the frame grabber sends an asynchronous reset command to the camera, and enters a waiting phase. Simultaneously, the camera enters the frame exposure condition.
Thereafter, an intense data transfer takes place to transport a video frame from the camera into the frame grabber. This is the readout condition for the camera, closely matching the acquisition phase for the frame grabber The rationale for the acquisition phase is to bring a video frame from the camera into the frame grabber.
Finally, the frame grabber applies a rich set of data conditioning actions to the acquired image, and sends it through the peripheral bus to the host computer memory.