PICCOLOR Newsletter Spring 2013

Again a lot has been done on the hardware side: extremely fast quad/six core processors by AMD and Intel have been presented, and especially the new Intel Sandy Bridge technology seems to shine in picCOLOR applications. Finally the Sandy Bridge E processor came to the market and provides connection abundancy with 40 PCIe lanes. With the new and excellent mainboards from ASROCK, the Extreme7 and Extreme9, systems have been build with 4 high speed frame grabbers, resulting in a combined transfer rate of 3GigaBytes/s!
New camera/PC-interfaces have been proposed during the last 3 years, but the standardisation commitee was not fast enough to decide for a good standard or to influence the development into the right direction. Therefore the Full CameraLink Interface seems to be the best interface right now, too bad. The new interfaces like CameraLink HS (for High Speed) or the coaXPress interface have a few advantages, but too many disadvantages to be really useful except for a few applications. Cable length is a big problem, as with CXP you can only have up to 30m at high speed, and with DALSAs approach to CameraLink HS with the CX4 connectors 15m will be the maximum. Glassfibe solutions for CXP will not be available at all, and for CLHS only for systems using the SFP+ connectors.

New frame grabbers and camera interfaces 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 Teledyne-Dalsa grabbers.
Euresys developed a new CameraLink Full grabber, the GrabLink Full, that has an extraordinary good price and also provides an extended cable length.

Some of the new functions implemented in the past year are:

New functions in the picCOLOR basic program:

- TWAIN2 interface was implemented, enabling now usage of TWAIN applications in the 64bit version
- PCO SC2 API for FireWire and CameraLink cameras has been extended with GigE and USB interface
- The number of frame grabbers that picCOLOR will reserve can now be set in the configuration file
- TIFF images with LZW compression can be loaded and stored.
- TIFF images with 4 components can be loaded and stored (CMYK).
- Random Seed function
- New Random generators (Mersenne)
- Pixel-exact cursor control by shift keys even at zoom-out image mode
- Processor thread distribution can be preselected with STARTUP.INI file
- High resolution timer now in micro-seconds
- Wiener filter and Inverse filter in Frequency domain is now SSE2 and AVX optimized
- Hamming and Blackman windowing in frequency domain
- Variables and Strings can be send to picCOLOR via DDE or TCP/IP
- DDE service can have different names for different instances of picCOOR
- Many other minor improvements of the basic functions are implemented

3D/Sequence extension module:

- New simple measurement functions for sequence images

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

- 3D-tracking is now multithreaded. Each of the stereo images gets one thread, and the graphics gets one extra thread
- Inhibit-Isotop option for marker search
- Many other minor improvements of the Real Time Tracking module are implemented

Particle Image Velocimetry extension module:

- New Time-Resolved PIV function was implemented, used up to 32 threads and can do real time PIV at high speed

Bar code module:

- The ZBar library was implemented, so far for QR codes only, but other codes from the ZBar lib can be implemented on request

New Graph Theory extension module:

- Voronoi and Delauney graphs

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
- Real Time Processing
- Fringe Correlation Method (for surface deflection measurement)
- True Color Extensions
- OCR/OCV Character recognition and rotation
- Bar Code Reader 1D/2D
- Neuronal Network Processing
- Graph Theory
- User-Programming in "C"

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