gig E 1050 camera to see laser beam profile

[winterfresh11]

Hi everyone,

So I'm using a GiG E 1050 camera in labview to take an image of my laser beam spot on a IR detector card and then import that image to an example vi called Line Profile.vi. This seems to work pretty well for me because I can draw a line through the spot with the program and see a rough profile of my laser. Ideally this beam should have a top hat profile so the line/intensity should be flat across the beam and in this program the line profile is flat. I would love to do this in real time however so I don't have to stop and run two different programs. I'm wondering if there are any vi's out there that will in real time cut an image from my GiG E camera horizontally and vertically and graph the line profile/intensity of it?

[kkleine]

Hi winterfresh11,

Why are you needing to break the image into halves horizontally and vertically? Could the desired effect be accomplished by using regions of interest for the desire half (or quarter) you are trying to examine? Are you trying to graph four different line profiles of the laser - one for top, bottom, left, and right? Any additional information would be useful for recommending next steps.

Have a good evening!

Regards, 

Kevin K.

Applications Engineer 

National Instruments 

http://www.ni.com/support

[Gregory]

If you are using the IMAQ functions from the Vision Acquisition Software then there should be one called something like "Image to Array". This will give you a 2D array, and you can just use index array to pull out the row or column that you want to look at.

[winterfresh11]

Hi Kevin,

I was just thinking that to measeure the profile in real time it would be easiest to have the program measure one line horizontal and one line vertical. I wrote a program one time that uses the cursor function I think it was called and you just drag it to what ever point on the picture you want and it plots the intenstiy along the each line so you have a horizontal profile and a verticle profile. I'd like to use a similar concept but in real time with the vision software addon package to take the spot my camera is looking at and plot a single horizontal profile and a single verticle profile and I guess it could be along some preset ROI. The current example program i'm using does what I would like to do, but you have to load a picture each time 

[winterfresh11]

I used the  Line Profile.vi and it is almost what I want, I just wanted it to be more real time so when i adjust the alignment of my beam shaper I can instantly see the effect on the beam profile. Now I have to take a picture and analyze it each ti