The frame grabber is an add-in computer peripheral board designed to capture one or more still frames from a video input source, typically a camera. For over two decades, this dedicated piece of hardware has been entrusted to capture images transmitted in a variety of different ways, from legacy analog to higher-performance digital means. The need for this dedicated piece of image acquisition hardware has been put to question over the last few years with the introduction of camera interface standards that are based on widespread computer connectivity, such as FireWire, USB and Gigabit Ethernet. These camera interface standards take advantage of the connectivity found on today’s computers to reduce overall system cost and complexity.
Almost all of today’s frame grabbers have designs based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices.