Since the inception of industrial machine vision cameras, various camera interfaces have been developed to meet the needs of the camera manufacturers. Many of the consumer market interfaces like Firewire, USB and and Ethernet were created for standard peripheral or networking use. Other interfaces like Camera Link and CoaXpress were developed specifically for imaging since no other interface provided the necessary throughput required for high speed imaging.
As resolution and frame rates increased over time, so have the requirements for camera interfaces. While the machine vision industry has adopted GigE and USB as the primary interfaces for imaging, we’ll explore at a high level the most common interfaces used throughout industrial imaging and touch on the future of USB and GigE.