Integration of USB and firewire cameras in machine vision applications

Digital cameras have been around for many years, but a new breed of consumer market cameras is hitting the main stream. By using these devices, system designers and integrators will be well. positioned to take advantage of technological advances developed to support multimedia and imaging applications on the PC platform. Having these new cameras on the consumer market means lower cost, but it does not necessarily guarantee ease of integration. There are many issues that need to be accounted for like image quality, maintainable frame rates, image size and resolution, supported operating systems, and ease of software integration. This paper will describe briefly a couple of the consumer digital standards, and then discuss some of the advantages and pitfalls of integrating both USE and Firewire cameras into computer/machine vision applications.