Import Live Video into LabVIEW

[WNECbear]

I am an electrical engineering working on my senior project at Western New England College. I am working with a small team building a quadrotor UAV and part of my task is to add some image processing to the craft. I have the algorithm to do the processing but I am not sure how to import the images into LabVIEW. We are using a FlyCamOne3 camera on the UAV and transmitting the images back through a 5.8 GHz transmitter and want to take the video from the receiver into LabVIEW. We do not have a large budget so I was hoping I could use a standard capture card to read the video in and pass it to LabVIEW. I read that the device needs to be DirectShow compliant but I do not know what that means exactly. The reading I did indicated that DirectShow is a piece of software from Microsoft and not a part of the hardware. Our team plans to run all of the code on a laptop so the capture card would have to be USB, firewire, or ethernet. I would really appreciate any help finding an appropriate capture card for this application or some other solution to the problem.

Thanks for your help

Tyler

[Paul_M.]

Hi Tyler,

Could you tell me more about the receiver that you're using? What will the output of this receiver be? If you can find a receiver that is DirectShow Compliant then we could simply connect the receiver straight into your laptop and use the IMAQdx drivers to acquire from it. DirectShow only applies to USB devices and it is required for our IMAQdx to be able to communicate with the device. Check out this link to read more about our USB Camera support and DirectShow.

Paul M

[WNECbear]

We are using the FlyCamOne 3 5.8 GHz transmitter / receiver set as well. The video output is a 3.5mm TRRS so it does not seem as though it is a DirectShow compliant device. We were wondering if we could just buy a TRRS to RCA adaptor, run that into a USB video capture card, and then read that data into LabView. Would it be possible to do that?

Thanks,

Tyler

[Paul_M.]

Hi Tyler,

The only way it could potentially work is if the USB Video Capture Card is DirectShow Compliant. That's the only way that our IMAQdx drivers will be able to communicate with the capture card.

Paul M

[WNECbear]

I have spent a good part of the day searching for firewire, ethernet, and USB 2.0 capture cards without having much success. It appears that the options on that front are fairly limited and I was having a hard time confirming that the options I found would be DirectShow compliant. I finally found an older thread on this forum which suggested to use a video to firewire converter however. I managed to find Video-to-USB converter which converts from an RCA video to USB and the documentation claims it has a driver for LabView. Is there any way to tell if this would be compatible with newer version of LabView? I am concerned that the hardware is about 5 years old and if things have changed substantially in the way LabView aquires the image then it may not be compatible anymore.

Thanks,

Tyler

[WNECbear]

I contacted The Imaging Solution and they confirmed that as long as my input source was either NTSC or PAL then I should be able to bring it into LabVIEW just fine. They apparently have a VI which works with their hardware. I'm not exactly sure if that will allow me to do everything I need because this is really my first experience with LabVIEW. At least I have a starting point to go from now!

Thanks for your help,

Tyler