vertical lines in Image

[Paul Q]

We are using the PCI 1410 Framegrabber and labview 8 with a camera we built using a sony 1/4'' B/W CCD. The camera works fine hooked up to a standard BNC monitor however MAX doesn't like us very much and we are seeing distinct vertical lines throughout the image. We are pretty sure its not due to unwanted frequnecy since we applied a low pass filter with no attenuation to the lines whatsoever. An NI engineer suggested the camera file. What options in the standard RS170 file could be causing this error? I tried different camera files from sony that had similair ccd's to no avail yet. Any help is appreciated.

[Allison_S]

Paul,

    There is a document on our webpage, Anatomy of a Video Signal, which mentions the various things needed to be known about a camera in order to prepare communication, as well as the standards expected.  This camera is a RS170, but apparently it is a 60Hz frame rate (as per our phone conversation).  According to that document, the standard expected for RS170 is 30Hz, so it does vary from the standard (if 60Hz is indeed the case).  This could very easily create an issue with communication to our driver because our driver is expecting 30Hz.  Also, there are several parameters that need to match up between the camera and the software:

• # of lines/frame
• line frequency: 15.750 kHz is the standard for RS170
• line duration
• active horizontal duration
• # active pixels/line: 640 is the standard for RS170

    Do you have this information about the camera?  Making sure that this data matched up is a great way to start troubleshooting.  Also, could you attach a screen shot of the image with the vertical lines across it so that I can get an idea of what exactly it's doing?  Thank you 🙂

Allison S.

Applications Engineering

[Paul Q]

I've attached two images of what were seeing in MAX. We double checked our camera and its operating at standard frequency 30Hz not 60 howevever the pixels are not standard as you mentiond (640x480). Our interline ccd is at 768x494 and max won't accept these numbers for some reason. manually changing that in the camera file just loads the default 640x480. Everything else appears to be standard however.

Sincerely

Paul Quevedo

[Paul Q]

I tried using the 1410 in External and External H lock and i keep getting errors. It either says non-recognizable video source or timeout error blah blah blah everytime. it will only acquire in standard mode. I thought the 1410 was supposed to be able to take a composite video signal and generate its own pixel clock in External H clock mode. Why am i getting this error? Am i misinterperting how this mode works? Thanks

Paul Quevedo
McMaster University.

[Allison_S]

Paul,

    Ok, so I have a few questions and a few things to try.  First of all, I noticed that the two images are different -- are there settings differences between those two images?  If so what settings and what changes did you make to them?  Also, try changing settings and let me know which ones make a difference and which don't.
    Something to try, open the LabVIEW example that snaps an image, and alter it using the Vision File VI's to save the image to a file and send that to me so that I can see what the acquired image in LabVIEW looks like.
    One final thing, you say that MAX wont accept the values of your camera's dimensions.  What do you mean by that? Does it give you an error when you try to enter those values?  Thanks

-Allison S.

[Paul Q]

I have a picture snapped with the VI you asked. It’s the same result as in MAX. The two pictures posted on the discussion forum are the same, one is just zoomed in to show the lines more distinctly, that’s all. The only thing that changes the lines is the reference pixels per line; that is a large value makes few lines that are very large and "fat" where as a smaller value makes more of them but very skinny. The image behind the lines stays the same in proportion just the lines change width. If you lower this value too far the image starts flickering and eventually times out.

No when we enter our image dimensions it just takes whatever value we put and changes it automatically to the max size, I suppose this is determined by the X and Y position of the image which if we change to 0 and 0 we can get the dimensions we want but it doesn’t help. The lines still show up

Sincerely
 
 
Paul Quevedo

[Pcha]

Hi. Do you know why those vertical lines appeared?

[NIquist]

You are replying to a thread that's 18 YEARS OLD!  I doubt anyone is still working on this problem.

If you have a camera issue, you should start a new thread here or over in the Machin Vision board:  Machine Vision - NI Community