Platform-independent USB industrial cameras

Paul Boughton

IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH is extending its portfolio with the first USB 2.0 UVC board level cameras for low-cost, high-volume projects.

UVC (or USB video class) is a standard that combines certain devices into a special class of USB devices. UVC industrial cameras bring the advantage that users do not need to install a particular driver to use the cameras. They provide platform-independent operation (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) and images can be produced as soon as the camera is connected to computer.

These first UVC cameras from IDS are part of the uEye LE family of cameras with a choice between the UV-1551LE (board-level with a M12 lens holder for competitively priced S-mount lenses) and UV-1552LE (board-level with no lens holder). The cameras feature a 1/3-in 2MP CMOS sensor to provide a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels with an aspect ratio of 4:3 and 15 frames per second. Images at VGA (640 x 480), SVGA (800 x 600) and HD (1024 x 768) resolution are also available. Manually adjustable features including brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness and exposure time are also provided.

Users may also implement their own applications for the UVC camera via DirectShow (Windows) or Video4Linux (Linux). UVC board-level cameras are suited for applications in machine vision, mechanical and OEM engineering, transportation, security and process monitoring as well as in embedded and kiosk systems. IDS recommends VLC player and AMCap (Windows), GUVCView (Linux) and Facetime (OS X) for a quick set-up and evaluation of the camera.