Features
Cameras
- Standard cameras, PAL, NTSC, CCIR and RS-170
- Up to 4 cameras
Acquisition
- Acquisition up to 50/60 fps
- Square pixels, broadcast and custom resolutions
- Frame, field, CIF, QCIF and custom image formats
- Planar, packed, YUV and RGB color formats
Interface
- Conventional PCI
- 32 bits, 33 MHz, 5 V
System
- 4 standard BNC video connectors
- DMA transfer
- FCC and CE compliant
Drivers
- Multiple boards in parallel
- DirectShow filter
- MultiCam interface
- Windows drivers
- Linux drivers
Video Image Formats
This board acquires color or monochrome video images from composite or S-Video interlaced video signals.
The NTSC-M and PAL-B/G color standards are supported.
The monochrome video acquisition complies with the so-called CCIR (625 lines) and EIA RS-170 (525 lines) standards.
Acquisition of full frame (two fields) or single field images is selectable.
Acquisition
Before PCI transfer to the PC, the acquired images can be scaled to any format smaller than the original one, down to 1/12. The downscaling process involves a sophisticated hardware device, performing an accurate interpolation in both the horizontal and vertical direction. The image buffer for a downscaled image is smaller in size and its transfer needs less PCI bandwidth.
Moreover, any part of the incoming image can be retained for further PCI transfer, allowing to define region of interest.
All desirable adjustments can be applied to the images during acquisition, such as video contrast, brightness, color saturation and hue (NTSC only).
Synchronization
A fully digital technique is used to synchronize the digitizer operation on the incoming video signal. This ensures a stable and robust operation despite the varying video conditions.
A poor video signals issued by a low end VCR is robustly supported. When using high-quality video surveillance cameras, the acquisition performance is exemplary, as demonstrated by a jitter figure in the nanosecond range.
Image Fidelity
All precautions have been taken to ensure an excellent fidelity of the grabbed bitmap in respect of the original video signal. In particular, environmental conditions may induce common-mode noise in the signal issued by distant cameras. This board has special circuitry to remove this defect, and this is highly appreciated in the video surveillance applications.
Bus Mastering
This board is a PCI bus mastering agent that directly stores the acquired images into the PC physical memory without CPU involvement. It automatically recovers the scatter-gather virtual memory mapping to present the data as a regular bitmap image in a user allocated memory buffer.