Image Acquisition; General Camera Architecture - Smartek Vision Giganetix GC Series User Manual

4 Image Acquisition

4 Image Acquisition
The following chapter gives a brief overview about the general principles of digital image acquisition based
on the Giganetix series, starting at the point where the image was projected to the image sensor plane. It
further includes a description of the camera's main functionality as well as the main configuration options of
the image acquisition.

4.1 General Camera Architecture

The Giganetix camera series consist of multiple electronic components to convert incoming light to a digital
signal, process it and send it to the host device or network. Figure 80 shows the simplified architecture of
each camera, containing the image data path (orange) from the sensor to the Ethernet Network, as well as
multiple control paths (red).
Image
ADC
VGC
Sensor
MCU
FPGA
GPIO
Ethernet
RAM
Network
Controller
Control Data
Image Data
Figure 80: Camera Architecture Scheme
Like shown in Figure 80, the image data chain (orange) starts with the Image Sensor converting incoming
light to electrical load. On usual area image sensors, over a million pixels are arranged in a two dimensional
array on which the light of a scene is projected through a lens. Each pixel captures the photons of the light
at a different point of the scene, making it possible to detect the whole scene within a defined grid. Hitting
the sensor's active pixel array, photons generate electrons which in turn create an electrical load in each
pixel, defining the intensity of each. The amount of electrical load depends on the strength of the light and
the time frame for which the pixels are exposed to light, the so called Exposure or Integration Time.
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SMARTEK Vision Giganetix User Manual Version 2.1.4