Why Industrial Cameras Lose Frame?

The frame loss is a common problem in the industrial camera. Its reason has no great relationship with the transmission interface of the camera. The main reason lies in the hardware of the industrial camera and the poorly designed driving program. Such a condition has very uncertain effect and influence to the visual inspection of the machine. The three main reasons why the industrial camera loss frame are as follows.

1. Hardware design of the industrial camera

Industrial camera transforms the optical signal of the image into ordered electrical signal. In the process, the imaging sensor transmits the image to the USB chip of the camera, and then USB chip transmits it to the computer. However, if the system of the computer is busy in a certain period, thus failing to receive the image in time, and the subsequent images are delivered continuously, the images to be received will be lost. The industrial camera is required to have the buffer memory space, otherwise the frame loss phenomenon will occur.

2. Application program part of the visual software

The image space of the await calculation of the visual software has the buffer mechanism or not, so as to prolong the time of the image cache grab buffer time, thus enabling the program to have enough time to calculate. However, if the CUP processing speed of the PC terminal is slower than the speed if image entering, it will cause the cache space overload, or frame loss problem.

3. Hardware PC system part

The PC part mainly depends on the hardware driving program. The most important thing is that the power of the driver and the number of kernel-level treads in the system can split the CPU. The receiving power is not good, and the industrial camera has no sound buffer memory, then resulting in the frame loss phenomenon.

In the machine vision system, the frame loss rate of the industrial camera is usually high, and the self-contained buffer of the industrial camera is also limited which mainly act as the auxiliary function of temporary busyness treatment for dispatching system. The speed of machine visual software is slower than the image entering speed of the industrial camera. After a long period, it will result in the saturation, overflow and loss of the software cache. Therefore, for both USB interface and GigE interface of industrial cameras, the frame loss phenomenon will occur. Optimizing the processing speed of the machine visual software is very important as well.

The problem why the frame loss of the industrial camera occurs is indeed caused by the blockage of the material channel, so it is unable to be processed by the technology. Therefore, when the new images are collected, the former image might be forced to be abandoned, or the new image will probably be forced to be abandoned. Generally speaking, the frame loss of the industrial camera is not related to the transmission interface adopted by the industrial camera. For USB, 1394, GigE, or camera-link, the poorly designed driving program or industrial camera hardware is the true reason of frame loss. In order to solve this problem, the designers are required to conduct precision design to every link of the driving program and industrial camera hardware material transmission.