Accessing USB Camera with IMAQ

[conk77]

I am trying to take images at the same frequency as my data acquisition using Labview's Vision Software. I am connecting to a Sony DSC-RX10M3 through a USB to UBC-Hub, which then connects to the USBC ports on my laptop. 

My computer and labview are not recognizing the camera.

Is Sony DSC-RX10M3 compatible with Labview? Is there a way to get IMAQ to work with USB?

I appreciate any help

[Bob_Schor]

I asked Google what it knew about Camera Interfaces supported by NI Software, and it led me here.  As I expected, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to use the camera you named with LabVIEW Vision software.  Now, if you wanted to use the little video camera built into your laptop or a Logitech WebCam ...

Another piece of advice -- spend a year or two (or, as in my case, 4 or 5) before approaching LabVIEW Vision (and get yourself someone who has had some experience with it -- it can be quite confusing) before starting a LabVIEW Vision project.

Bob Schor

[rolfk]

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@conk77 wrote:

Is Sony DSC-RX10M3 compatible with Labview? Is there a way to get IMAQ to work with USB?

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That question is confused! 😁

There are many ways to access a camera from a software program. IMAQdx, which is the actual driver that you need to access cameras in LabVIEW supports several but by far not all, since there are so many standards and each standard also can have many compression schemes and a lot of them are patented and trying to decompress the contained streams not only requires the correct software source code but also a legal agreement with the patent owner to be allowed to use that software in ones product. With dozen of standards and even more compression schemes this quickly adds up and makes supporting everything not just a technical challenge but also a legal one, and those legal people really can be a pain in the ass.

If your camera is available under Windows as DirectX device it can be accessed by IMAQdx independent if it is built into your computer, or connected through USB or any other interface. But there is a very limited amount of attributes you can control on such a camera.

Other cameras that are supported by recent IMAQdx:

- all the NI cameras of course

- Camera Link 2.1

- GenICAM 3.3

- GigE Vision 2.0 (partially)

- USB3 1.0.1

Version 20.6 removed support for IIDC/DCAM cameras (IEEE-1394 or Firewire)

You may think: but there is USB3 in there and my camera is USB, but that is not a guarantee unfortunately. Your camera only has an USB2 connector and as such only supports MTP or similar. This is an old standard that is just meant to transfer still images by accessing the camera as a sort of external flash drive. You need special software to access that which goes explicitly through the Windows WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) interface, another basically abandoned Windows technology. It's predecessor was STI (Still Image) which was never really used and abandoned too by Microsoft.

Basically if you could find a WIA to DirectX bridge you could use this camera with the IMAQdx driver as you could access it like a WebCam. But I'm not aware of such a driver bridge since the technology (Still Image on your camera and Motion image on a Webcam) are very much not the same.

I used to have a WIA interface for LabVIEW but that was around 2003 and not only would I have to dig it out from some old archives, but I also can not provide that for free nor would I expect it to work under Windows 10 just out of the box.