Cameras are everywhere. The need for increased automation, higher quality manufacturing, and smarter machines has fueled the growth of vision being embedded into machines, robots and other systems that can use visual data to gain a more complete understanding of the environment around them. The volume of industrial cameras being embedded into systems has been shifting away from interfaces that require expensive dedicated frame grabbers to using consumer-based buses like FireWire, Ethernet, and USB, which enable vision to be added to a greater number of systems. The latest step forward in this trend is the recent release of the USB3 Vision standard.
The standard was released in January 2013 and is a new machine vision standard based off of the USB 3.0 interface. USB3 Vision has a number of benefits for industrial and embedded vision applications, especially over the USB 2.0 interface. Ten billion USB 2.0 ports exist in the world today, but the bus was never universally adopted as an industrial camera interface and while the bandwidth limitations surely decreased the potential adoption rate, one of the main reasons for the limited success of USB 2.0 in machine vision applications is the lack of a standard. If you wanted to use a specific USB camera, it means you generally had to commit to using that vendor’s SDK or API to interact with the camera or potentially find some third party software package that happened to support that particular camera.