APRIL 29, 2009--The 2009 GenICam and GigE Vision Technical Meeting took place in Munich, Germany, from April 21 to 24, and hosted by MVTec Software (Munich, Germany). Twenty six participants from 17 companies and organizations came to Munich to push the progress of the GenICam and GigE Vision industry standards.
The standards are intended to ease and unify image acquisition as well as the configuration of industrial cameras for machine vision. "This is highly desirable for users as well as manufacturers," says Christoph Zierl, product manager at MVTec and organizer of the meeting.
For GenICam, camera manufacturer can provide their own proprietary programming interface for parameterization and image acquisition. However, the GenICam standard enables control the functionality of any camera via a common generic programming interface. The standard has become popular because it is mandatory for all cameras and applications that are compatible to the GigE Vision standard.
The GenICam GenTL standard defines a software interface by which any camera may be chosen for machine-vision applications without the needing a custom adaptation. Cameras may be connected by Gigabit Ethernet, USB, IEEE 1394, or Camera Link digital interface standards.
The focus of the meeting was on publication of the GenICam modules 1.2 and GenTL 1.1 (planned in autumn 2009). The GigE Vision standard will be expanded in such a way that non-streaming devices can be addressed by this protocol.
All in all, the participants agreed that the standardization of image acquisition interfaces and protocols means considerable added value, as proprietary connections no longer have to be developed and maintained.
-- Posted by Vision Systems Design, www.vision-systems.com
