JAI has released the latest version of its GigE Vision SDK and Control Tool software, which is ideal for multi-vendor evaluations, prototyping and other activities.
Version 1.3.0 of the software supports the GigE Vision 1.1 and Genicam 1.2 standards, including the Genicam Standard Feature Naming Convention (SFNC), which allows any SFNC-compliant camera, regardless of interface type, to be accessed and controlled using a common set of camera feature names.
The JAI SDK and Control Tool software is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions and is compatible with Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
The company recently also upgraded the firmware in all of the GigE Vision cameras in its C3 Camera Suite to take advantage of the GigE Vision 1.1 and Genicam 1.2 standards.
Vision system designers can combine JAI cameras with the new 1.3.0 SDK or with any GigE Vision-/Genicam-compliant third-party software package when integrating JAI cameras into vision applications.
As with previous versions of the JAI SDK, the software can also be used with non-JAI GigE cameras.
Version 1.3.0 also provides support for GigE Vision Action Command broadcast telegrams.
Applications incorporating this feature can transmit commands across the network and have multiple devices responding based on their 'group' designation and how they have been programmed to respond to certain broadcast commands.
In this way, a single command can trigger multiple cameras, reset timestamps or perform other actions with minimum latency and programming effort.
The new SDK also incorporates support for firewall traversal.
The software can automatically detect cameras that support this function (such as JAI's latest C3 GigE Vision cameras) and open up the firewall for the stream channel and/or the message channel for these devices.
With this capability, users do not have to disable their firewalls to get information from their GigE Vision devices.
Among the other new SDK features are complete lookup table functionality, built-in functions to flip and rotate images, histogram functions, Unicode support including multi-byte characters, the dynamic loading/unloading of the .dll file and new event handling support for mouse actions and window movement/resizing.
The camera control tool portion of the new software includes a Processing tab for the real-time utilisation of lookup table functionality, histogram functions and flip-and-rotate capabilities.
Also included in the latest version is a drop-down window to simplify the selection of installed Video-for-Windows codecs, new wizards for configuring basic trigger modes, mouse-driven panning and zooming in the video window and the ability to move and/or click the mouse within the video window to display the cursor location, bit depth and pixel values of the cursor location.
To help users to take advantage of all the capabilities in the SDK and Control Tool package, JAI has added a variety of sample applications.
Most are provided in both C and C++ programming languages and some are available in the C# language.
Included are sample applications for auto-exposure, lookup table operation (LUT), image transformation (flipping and rotating), statistics gathering (missing frames and missing packets), dynamic .dll loading and digital panning/zooming.
The samples can be used out of the box to facilitate the utilisation of the SDK capability; alternatively, they can be treated as templates to help users to create their own proprietary applications.
