Video acquisition

The pymanip.video module provides tools to help with camera acquisition. We use the third-party pymba module bindings to the AVT Vimba SDK for AVT cameras, the third-party pyAndorNeo module bindings to the Andor SDK3 library for the Andor Camera, the third-party pyueye module bindings to the IDS ueye library, the Python module provided by Ximea for the Ximea cameras, and PyVCAM wrapper for Photometrics camera.

We wrote our own bindings to the Pixelfly library for the PCO camera. Beware that the code works for us, but there is no garantee that it will work with your camera models.

The idea was for us to be able to switch cameras, without having to change much of the acquisition code. So we define an abstract pymanip.video.Camera base class, and all concrete sub-classes follow the exact same user API. The methods allow to start video acquisition, in a manner consistent with our needs, and also provides a unified live preview API. It also makes it relatively straightforward to do simultaneous acquisition on several cameras, even if they are totally different models and brands and use different underlying libraries.

The useful concrete classes are given in this table:

Camera type

Concrete class

AVT

pymanip.video.avt.AVT_Camera

PCO

pymanip.video.pco.PCO_Camera

Andor

pymanip.video.andor.Andor_Camera

IDS

pymanip.video.ids.IDS_Camera

Ximea

pymanip.video.ximea.Ximea_Camera

Photometrics

pymanip.video.photometrics.Photometrics_Camera

They all are sub-classes of the pymanip.video.Camera abstract base class. Most of the user-level useful documentation lies in the base class. Indeed, all the concrete implementation share the same API, so their internal methods are implementation details.

In addition, a high-level class, pymanip.video.session is provided to build simple video acquisition scripts, with possible concurrent cameras trigged by a function generator.

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