Auto Exposure And Auto Gain - Smartek UCC User Manual

8.2.3 Auto Exposure and Auto Gain

Cameras are often used in different environments and applications with changing conditions, what also
includes the illumination situation which may vary and change constantly. The exposure time determines
how bright or dark an image will appear; the longer the exposure, the brighter the image and vice versa. The
automatic exposure feature of the ImageProcAPI will automatically adjust the exposure time of SMARTEK
Vision cameras within defined limits, until the specified target brightness is reached.
Increasing the exposure time means decreasing the maximum possible frame rate, therefore in various
applications, where a specific minimum frame rate is required, the exposure time may not be arbitrarily high.
In this situation the brightness can be further increased applying a digital gain. The Auto Exposure feature
in the ImageProcAPI provides therefore a property to limit the maximum allowed exposure time, from which
the gain will be increased instead.
Auto Exposure in the CameraSuite SDK
In the CameraSuite SDK the ImageProcAPI provides the programming interface to set parameters and
execute the auto exposure algorithm to determine the new exposure time and gain adjustment values. The
bit depth and image type supported are shown in Table 55. For a detailed description on how to use the auto
exposure feature please refer to the CameraSuite API Help located in the doc folder of the CameraSuite
SDK installation directory.
Supported image input
Monochrome
Raw Bayer
Color RGB
Table 55: Auto exposure - supported bit depth and image type
Supported bit depth
8 bit per channel
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16 bit per channel
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