IT APPEARS LIKELY THAT USB3 VISION AND GIGEVISION WILL EMERGE AS THE FRONTRUNNERS FOR CAMERA SELECTION IN GENERAL PURPOSE INDUSTRIAL IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION.
A little more than one year has passed since the debut of the USB3 Vision™ standard (hosted by the Automated Imaging Association) for interfacing machine vision cameras via USB 3.0/3.1 computer ports (also known as “Superspeed USB” and USB3). Since that time, there has been observable growth in the availability of industrial cameras for machine vision that incorporate the USB3 Vision interface, and for good reason.
The widely available “plug-and-play” Universal Serial Bus (USB) communication standard, in this 3.x revision, now features transfer rates of up to and potentially exceeding 400 Megabytes per second. In the machine vision context, this speed significantly exceeds other computer port protocols such as FireWire, USB 2, and GigE, and compares favorably to speeds available from interface protocols requiring dedicated hardware and proprietary cabling (CameraLinkHS and CoaXPress). What this means for users of machine vision technology is that, with USB3 and USB3 Vision, an inexpensive and easy-to-implement interface is now available that supports the increasing resolution and frame rate requirements of today’s most demanding applications.