PICCOLOR Newsletter Winter 2008/2009

Again a lot has been done on the hardware side: extremely fast quad core processors by AMD and Intel have been presented, and especially the new Intel Core i7 technology seems to shine in picCOLOR applications... Several functions have been extended to run on up to 8 cores showing an extreme speed up on a dual quad-core machine.
Finally, some frame grabber manufacturers have developed 64bit drivers for their excellent PCI-Express (PCIe) frame grabbers.
A big problem, however, is the fact that digital I/O card manufacturers still struggle developing 64-bit drivers. Therefore, depending on the applications requirement to have programm-controlled counters or digital-I/O, some applications are still bound to 32-bit WINDOWS.
New frame grabbers, the NI1429 and NI1430 from National Instruments, have been adapted for picCOLOR. This is important as it allows to have a second source for high speed full and extended CameraLink besides the Dalsa/Coreco grabbers.
Some of the new functions implemented in the past year are:

New functions in picCOLOR basic program:

- Some new options for reading PBM images: P1 ASCII B/W, P4 Binary B/W
- TCP/IP interface has been extended: options are TCP or UDP, commands can be send and executed by picCOLOR etc.
- 64bit Sapera driver for the Xcelera frame grabber has been tested
- 64bit NI-IMAQ driver for the NI1429 and NI1430 frame grabbers has been tested (works under WOW64 only)
- Flat-field correction has been implemented in a first test version. This greatly improves camera images.
- Time Stamp of frame grabbers is not being measured in more exact us instead of the former 0.1ms
- New arithmetic function: Actual := (Actual - Second)*M + Actual
- New options to plot objects and object contours or surrounding rectangles are implemented
- Jpeg RGBK images from Photoshop can now be read

3D/Sequence extension module:

- A histogram of a 3D-vector in depth-direction can be calculated

2D/3D Real Time Object Tracking Extension Module:

- Several different trigger lines or options can now be active concurrently
- Different new options to define and determine markers that are non-visible
- Automatic measurement options
- The status line of 2D- or 3D-data now gives more information (frame index, time stamp, lost frames)
- Color coded ROIs or marker images can be used to show the successful recognition of markers
- Many other minor improvements of the Real Time Tracking module are implemented

Stereometric measurement and display module:

- Stereo display has been implemented for LCD-shutter glasses using DirectX functionality
- Sound (.WAV-files) can be played together with the display of stereo video streams

OCR/OCV Character recognition and rotation module:

- Text lines in an image can now be searched and averaged to find the mean text angle for rotation

Available special modules:

- 3D/Sequence processing
- Interferometry
- Stereometric measurement and display
- Particle Image Velocimetry / Particle tracking (PIV/PTV), also as Library or DLL
- 2D/3D-Position-Tracking in Real Time
- Fringe Correlation Method (for surface deflection measurement)
- True Color Extensions
- 1D/2D Bar Code Reader
- OCR/OCV Character recognition and rotation
- Real Time Processing
- User-Programming in "C"

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