industrial firewire cameras with jitter, mac OSX

If a camera is IIDC-compliant it should work under OSX. I can't speak for the Point Grey Firefly, as I haven't tried it, but it is IIDC. According to the specs, it uses a C/CS mount which means that there are plenty of lenses to chose from.

For other products in your price range, check out 1394Imaging (http://www.1394imaging.com/en/products/). I've been using the DFK21F04 for over two years without any problems. IIDC-compliant and uses C/CS mount for lenses. Their website also has several useful documents about cameras in general.

You should also look at Unibrain (http://www.unibrain.com/), which also manufactures Firewire cameras in your price range.

One option I'd look into is The Imaging Source's DFG/1394-1e (http://www.1394imaging.com/en/products/converters/dfg13941e /overview/). It's an video A/D converter. We use one and it works very well. The advantage is that there will be many more types of cameras you will be able to chose from, as analog cameras for the surveillance market are cheaper and more numerous than those for machine vision people.

Handycam-type camera often will give you prettier pictures. This is because they often use a 3CCD-type sensor. However, there are issues when using them for image analysis purposes. One is that you're paying for lots of hardware you don't need. You don't need the recording and playback features for instance. The second problem is that those cameras output their data as a DV stream. DV is a compressed format, which means you will lose CPU cycles decompressing it, affecting your performance. Finally, some cameras automatically shot off after a certain time if you don't keep a dummy tape running.

"Industrial" cameras typically output uncompressed video streams, which translates to better performance. Most if not all of the models in the price range you're interested in use Bayer filtering, which is cheaper but yields lower colour accuracy. However, in many vision applications you might not need the extra quality of 3CCD cameras.

"Industrial" cameras also allow you more flexibility in regards to frame rate and image size. For instance, Point Grey's Dragonfly Express can output data at up to 200fps. Some Imaging Source cameras do 1280x960 pixels.

In my experience, it helps a lot to have tools that are suited to your needs. Handycams are built to record video for viewing, while they can be used for vision purposes, that's not what they do best.

Quote: connollycleary@noos.fr wrote on Fri, 12 May 2006 02:22

> By the way, I see a chap called Damien Douxchamps (http://damien.douxchamps.net/ieee1394/cameras/index.php) has published a document listing and briefly evaluating firewire cameras, which looks very useful to a beginner like me.

Yes, that's the mother site, pretty much every camera is there. A lot of those are super-expensive, though.

Industrial cameras typically come with 1/4" sockets which means they can be mounted the same way as any other camera. This is true for The Imaging Source and Point Grey cameras and Unibrain's Fire-i 400.

Zoom lenses for Firewire cameras are manual. You adjust them just the same way you would adjust a still camera zoom. In many ways, this is better because you can manually lock the zoom to make sure your settings aren't accidentaly changed.

Focal length is adjusted in a similar fashion, through a ring on the lens.

As for other settings, they are accessed via the driver -- the "settings" message to jit.qt.grab. Furthermore, if the camera is IIDC-compatible, you can control all its settings from within your Jitter patch. This means that you can save your fine-tuned settings as presets, or control them in real-time. See the iidc_support sub-patcher in the jit.qt.grab helpfile.

OK, that all looks great and thanks once again.
Fortunate to hear from someone so informed.
Been looking seriously at Unibrain's Fire-i 400 (http://www.unibrain.com/Products/VisionImg/Fire_i_400_Indus trial.htm) which looks like a good low budget solution...

Jean-Marc Pelletier wrote
"Industrial" cameras also allow you more flexibility in regards to frame rate and image size. For instance, Point Grey's Dragonfly Express can output data at up to 200fps. Some Imaging Source cameras do 1280x960 pixels.

Has anyone tested this, does the jitter digitizer support frame rates up to 200 fps (if your computer is fast enough)?

hc

another fire0i question, i have been looking @ the fire-i new RAW color
camera< http://www.1394store.com/eshop/product.asp?dept%255Fid=55&am p;pf%255Fid=2059 >.
from what i understand it allows for better color profiling inside the
computer, will it be hard, based on this
pdf< http://www.unibrain.com/download/pdfs/RAW_Color_Cameras_v2.p df >to
incorporate this feature in jitter?

I find that working with complex patches from live video feed, my output is often reduced to something around 15 fps, even from a G5 processor; I am constantly playing around with smaller matrixes and collapsing 4 char to 1 char to spare my processor. I can't imagine how putting 200 fps or 1280x960 pixels through a patch would not just slow things up more...

i have found that working with a Color Quad Processor/Spltter can get you
the benfit of 4 channels in one grab.
300 fps or 1280x960 pixels resolution and frame rates are not suitable for
video work, even in most industrial scenarios, they are not needed. 25fps in
a 160X120 for live tracking is recommended by many and i find enough for
data. if you want output the grab out, use half pal which scales good.
this is true for cheap labor, if have fasterbigger aspirations, check the
verygood thread awhile back on high res video input.
2c.

"300 fps or 1280x960 pixels resolution and frame rates are not suitable for
video work, even in most industrial scenarios, they are not needed. 25fps in
a 160X120 for live tracking is recommended by many and i find enough "

Lets just assume that I have other interests using a live input than having 25fps 160x120 for tracking purposes.

I am interested to find out if it is technically possible to input lets say 50 fps or 100 fps at 640x480, or 5 fps at 1280x960, using current mac drivers and max.

hc