“A revision of GigE Vision”

GigE is fast becoming the primary camera communication format in the machine vision world, and on the principle that if you know what happens under the hood you can be a better driver, I thought I’d share a couple of links to a whole bunch of technical stuff.

“Standard Gives Machine Vision Systems a New Image” is a two part series published on the Vision Systems Design website (January 1^st, 2012,) that details how GigE actually works. It was written by Vincent Rowley of Pleora Technologies, so it’s about as close to the source as it’s possible to get.

Part 1, linked to above, provides background on the standard. Part 2, gets into details about the benefits. Obviously, bumping the speed up to 10Gbits/s (10 GigE) is the big deal, but there are other enhancements too.

• RJ45 connectors and Cat6A cables are not the only means of physically linking camera to PC; there are also “small-form-factor pluggable-plus” (SPF+) connectors. Vincent notes that these are “The least power-hungry option available to system integrators building 10 GigE systems…”.
• Reduced transmission overhead, making 10 GigE of greater interest for linescan applications.
• Support for interlaced video
• Improved support for multitap sensors (something that’s going to grow in importance as sensor manufacturers strive to increase both resolutions and frame rates.

In short, there’s a lot of detail in these two articles. It might be a bit much for folks who just want to deploy smart camera applications (my machine vision “users”,) but if you have any interest in learning about advances in camera interfaces I recommend taking a look.