FireWire camera for Image/Video Acquisition

[NI_User_77]

Hi!

I want to use a DMK 21F04 FireWire camera (http://www.theimagingsource.com/en/products/cameras/firewire_mono/dmk21f04/overview/) through a IEEE 1394a Interface in LabView for acquiring images and video sequences. The camera has VGA resolution and is monochrome  Can someone please help me setup the camera so LabView recognizes it? I have looked into the Grab and Save to AVI.vi and Grab and Select Mode.vi.

My problem is that neither of these VIs work since LabView can not recognize the camera.

Can someone help me please?

Thanks in advance.

[Matt_W1]

I have a DFK 31AF03, it doesn't look like the software is any different. Did you install the device driver and IC Image Control software (+ labview extensions) that comes with the camera (or came with my camera at least). I can't find the either "Grab and Save to AVI.vi" nor "Grab and Select Mode.vi" on my system, so I'm not sure what you're looking at.

[NI_User_77]

I did install the software which accompanies the camera and looked at the LabView Extenions. The VIs that I was referring to come with LabView 8.2 and IMAQ. The problem I am having with the IC Image Control software is that I dont know how to acquire image sequences or movies and save them to a specific format. Do you know how to make a movie from a sequence of images using the grab buttons?

Thanks

[Matt_W1]

I'm using the built in functions of the camera to save video (so I don't use imaq). Under user controls for the front panel is a IC.ICImaging Control 3.ctl, the reference that outputs has properties and methods that can be used to save an avi file. I'd post an example but the camera is busy today. Bascially just use the AviStartCapture method from the reference. The tricky part is setting a valid compressor, a list of compressors can be found in the AviCompressors property (you can use Name as the input to AviStartCapture). There are other things to do like settings frame rate and video format but In your start menu\programs\ic imaging control 3.0\ic labview extensions\examples, should help you figure that part out.

If you want I can try to get a working example posted, but I may not be able to test it until tomorrow.

[NI_User_77]

Thanks so much for your help. The problem I am having right now is that I dont want any compression on the files what so ever. Since the images will be post-processed later on I can not allow any type of compression. I guess the optimal way to do it is to acquire a stacks of 200 images in TIFF format and somehow make a movie out of them, unless there is an AVI format without compression?

But I am dont know how to save a TIFF file since the File Path for each new file would be different. I would want to get something like File1.TIF, File2.TIF etc. But I am not sure how to do this in LabView.  The camera i am using is monochrome (640 x 480), 8 Bit.

What I have been able now is to get a live feed from the camera to the screen. However I don't know if the camera actually skips certain frames cause  the picture in labview is kind of "blinking" from time to time. Is there a good way how I could make sure the camera is not skipping any frames? I think it skips frame every second. I would be more than glad if you could post a working VI or answer my questions.

Thank you for your time

[Matt_W1]

Try to use huffyuv for the codec, it's lossless and very fast (the files can be quite big though). You can use the NI vision vi's to load the avi and convert it into a series of pngs (or tiffs), if need be. I haven't gotten frame skips in avis while using huffyuv for compression (unless LabVIEW gets stuck waiting for the hard disk I'm trying to save to spin up), the other codecs I tried seemed to drop frames without heavy tweaking. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a warning (that I've found) if a frame is dropped.

Message Edited by Matt W on 06-26-2007 05:18 PM