Connecting to your Matrox Iris GTR as your runtime platform

Section name

Description

Exposure

Specifies the general camera settings relating to the exposure.

Input

Description

Delay

Specifies a period of time to delay the start of the exposure, in msec. When set to 0, the exposure immediately follows the trigger (this is your supported Matrox smart camera's default behavior).

Time

Specifies the duration of the exposure period (following the optional exposure delay), in msec.

Input gain

Amplifies the video signal by a specified factor, which can make the captured image appear brighter. It can also amplify the noise present in the image. With a short exposure, you might need to set Input gain to a higher value to improve your results.

Black Offset

Specifies the offset to the black level of the image in the camera. Essentially, this offset is subtracted from the pixel value of the image before it is stored in memory. A low black offset will give a brighter image while a higher black offset will give a darker image.

Note that Input gain, Exposure, and Black Offset settings vary between the different models of smart cameras (for example, between Matrox Iris GTR300 and Matrox Iris GTR2000). When creating a new project, Matrox Design Assistant inquires these settings from your Matrox Iris GTR and can explicitly set these values for the smart camera you are using. When running this project on another model of smart camera, there might be inconsistencies. To create a project that will run correctly on various smart cameras, select the Default item for Input gain, Exposure time, and Timeout. Default settings; these will use the camera-specific values each time the project is deployed to a new Matrox Iris GTR.

Trigger

Specifies whether triggered grab mode is enabled in your project. For more information on triggering possibilities, see the Triggering section in Chapter 28: Acquisition.

There is one additional field to this section:

Input

Description

Debounce

Specifies the amount of time (in nsec) that, after detecting a valid trigger input signal edge, any other transitions are considered noise and are suppressed. This is useful when using mechanical trigger switches. With Matrox Iris GTR, a debounce time of at least 10000 nsec is recommended.

Grab direction

Specifies that the grab occurs from left to right (forward) or from right to left (backward).

Lighting

Specifies the strobe settings from your camera. For more information, see the Lighting control from the camera subsection of the Grab and auxiliary I/O overview section later in this chapter.

Partial scan

Specifies changes to the size of the grabbed image area (allowing the smart camera to perform a partial scan). The specified offset relates to the top-left corner of the scanned area within the full image.

LUT Map

Specifies the name of the file containing a lookup table (LUT) to use to map the pixel values of grabbed images before saving to memory (a point-to-point LUT mapping operation). Note that, to use this file, you must click on the Import button in the Cameras page.

In most situations, the same effect can be achieved with an ImageProcessing step, see the LutMap subsection of the ImageProcessing step operations section in Chapter 9: ImageProcessing step.

To create the file, use MIL. Allocate a buffer with the M_LUT attribute and then save the buffer to a file. By default, this file will have an extension of LUT.

Advanced

Specifies the grab reference source. When a software trigger is enabled, the source for the trigger can be the system clock, an I/O Command List, or a I/O Command List latch. For information about I/O Command Lists, see the Matrox Advanced I/O Engine section in Chapter 40: IO steps.