Problem with PCI-1422 setup

[hspec]

I have installed Labview, NI-IMAQ and NI-Vision assistant on my PC. I then installed a PCI-1422 digital Image card. I have a camera which I would like to aquire greyscale 16bit images using Labview. I have the recommended .icd file and I have setup the hardware to use this file in Measurement & Automation. The problem I am seeing is that in both the Measurement & Automation and in my Labview app, my grayscale acquisitions are very different than the results I see in the Vision Assistant. The image is faded (very low contrast) and hard to see in the M&A and LV app, but very good in the vision assistant. I cannot find any settings that improve this situation. The camera is an Indigo Systems Photon 320x256 (digital).

Any help would be very much appretiated,

Howard Spec

CMC Electronics

Canada

[GiGe]

Hi Howard,

The settings for the images in the Vision Assistant come from the Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX).  So if you haven't changed any of the settings in MAX when you use Vision Assistant then the default settings should give you the same image.  If you save your settings in MAX and then check Vision Assistant are you seeing the same images?  If the settings weren't saved in MAX then you may see different images in the two programs.  I hope this helps.  Keep me posted.

GG

[hspec]

That is the strange thing. The image in MAX is bad, but vision assistant image is correct even after saving settings in MAX. So it seems that the vision assistant is doing something different.  I removed the .icd file for my camera, and then tried the vision assistant program. It was unable to capture video, so it is using the same setup file as the MAX program

Howard

[Allison_S]

Howard,

    So you say that Vision Assistant works, but LabVIEW and MAX do not?  Did you take your Vision Assistant program and translate it to LabVIEW code?  That is an option and I would try it.  If the Vision Assistant code works correctly and the LabVIEW code does not, then there is most likely some sort of issue with the program.  Let me know if that is the case, thank you!

-Allison S.

Applications Engineering

[hspec]

Allison,

That was the first thing I tried. The vision assistant does not produce the code required to acquire the image. It starts with an existing image and allows you to enhance/modify that image. So this did not help.  I'm starting to get very frustrated with this situation. I can see having problems with my application, but I would expect that things should work properly in MAX.

Thanks for the suggestion,

Howard

[BruceAmmons]

I answered this on info-LabVIEW, but I will repeat my answer here.

I believe your acquisition is working the same in all cases, but the display mode is different.  For display purposes, the 16 bit image must be mapped to an 8 bit image.  If you use the Shift method, you get the gray image you described.  If you use Dynamic Range, the image is automatically scaled to fill the range 0 to 255.

You should be able to enable dynamic ranging in your image display in LabVIEW.  I'm not sure if that option is available in MAX, though.

Bruce