Our white paper, Understanding Frame Grabbers in Vision Systems, is a practical, technical introduction to frame grabbers for machine vision systems, explaining what a frame grabber is, how it works, and why it is essential for high-speed, high-reliability image acquisition.
It covers the complete data path, from camera input through processing, buffering, and transfer to the host PC, with a particular focus on CoaXPress, CoaXPress over Fiber, and Camera Link technologies used in modern industrial and scientific imaging.
The white paper offers a clear, engineer-focused explanation of what frame grabbers are, their core components, and the advantages they bring to machine vision, scientific imaging, and industrial applications. The paper explores how frame grabbers enable reliable, low-latency data transfer, optimize image capture, and integrate with cameras and processing hardware.
We introduce Active Silicon’s FireBird frame grabbers and Oncilla Machine Vision Computers, showing how commercial solutions align with the technical principles described throughout the paper.
Whether you’re evaluating frame grabber technology for your next project or deepening your technical knowledge, this resource provides the insights you need to make informed decisions.
Contents of the White Paper
1. Introduction
Explains the role of frame grabbers in modern machine vision systems and outlines the purpose and scope of the paper.
2. What is a Frame Grabber?
Defines a frame grabber as a real-time image acquisition device and describes common form factors, use cases, and the main components.
3. Benefits of Using Frame Grabbers in Vision Systems
Details the performance advantages of frame grabbers, including high-speed capture, low latency, CPU offloading, synchronization, and preprocessing capabilities.
4. Basic Operation
Describes the end-to-end process of receiving image data, conditioning it, buffering it, validating it, and transferring it to the host using PCIe and DMA.
5. Components and Architecture
Breaks down the internal architecture of a frame grabber, including interfaces for input and output, memory, FPGA processing, DMA engines, GPU support, data formatting, and error handling.
6. Integration and Implementation
Covers practical integration topics such as triggering, mechanical and electrical considerations, power and cooling, drivers, APIs, SDKs, and configuration tools.
7. Applications for Frame Grabbers
Explores real-world use cases including industrial automation, medical imaging, scientific research, broadcasting, and AI-driven vision systems.
8. FireBird Frame Grabbers from Active Silicon
Introduces Active Silicon’s FireBird product range, its GenICam compliance, GPU support, and integrated system offerings.
9. Conclusion
Summarizes the importance of frame grabbers and highlights their future role in advancing machine vision and AI-enabled imaging.
Who should read this paper?
This white paper is highly valuable for machine vision engineers, hardware designers, systems integrators, automation specialists, R&D professionals, and imaging software developers who need a deeper understanding of how frame grabbers operate within high-performance vision systems.
If you are designing or optimizing applications in industrial inspection, medical imaging, robotics, scientific microscopy, broadcast imaging, AI-based quality control, or high-speed data acquisition, this document provides a clear technical foundation for selecting, integrating, and maximizing the performance of frame grabbers, CoaXPress cameras, Camera Link systems, FPGA processing, and GPU-accelerated vision pipelines.
It is particularly useful for professionals looking to:
- Improve data throughput and reduce latency in vision systems
- Choose the right acquisition architecture for high-speed cameras
- Implement precise triggering and synchronization
- Enable GPU-accelerated or AI-powered image processing
- Design scalable and future-proof machine vision platforms
In short, any engineer seeking to build faster, more reliable, and more intelligent vision systems will benefit from reading this paper. In particular, anyone new to CoaXPress and Camera Link technology will gain valuable knowledge.