Technical Articles

Third-Party Products: Solutions for Image Acquisition and Computer Vision


MATLAB® and Simulink® provide a platform for engineers to explore images, develop computer vision algorithms, and evaluate implementation tradeoffs. Third-party imaging hardware enables them to acquire visible, thermal, depth, microscopy, and a range of other images. Engineers can analyze images, via live acquisition or by postprocessing in MATLAB, and then deploy computer vision applications such as object detection, tracking, and recognition onto embedded processors, FPGAs, multicore GPU systems, and other hardware.


FLIR Infrared Cameras

FLIR thermal and visible-light imaging sys­tems are used in a wide variety of thermal im­aging, situational awareness, and security ap­plications. Using Image Acquisition Toolbox™, engineers can configure features of FLIR in­frared cameras and stream fully temperature-calibrated data directly into MATLAB for analysis, visualization, and modeling.


Microsoft Kinect

Microsoft® Kinect® for Windows includes a 3D depth sensor and integrated RGB camera for applications such as robotics, kinesiology, 3D scene reconstruction, point-cloud processing, and skeletal tracking. Engineers can acquire 3D data from Microsoft Kinect into MATLAB and Simulink using Image Acquisition Toolbox and Computer Vision Toolbox™.


Allied Vision FireWire and GigE Vision Cameras

Allied Vision offers high-performance IEEE-1394 FireWire, GigE Vision®, and USB3 Vision compliant digital cameras for machine vision, computer vision, and other industrial or medical applications. Cameras include CCD and CMOS sensors ranging from VGA to 29 megapixels. Image Acquisition Toolbox, with Allied Vision’s Vimba Software Development Kit (SDK), enables direct access to the cameras from MATLAB and Simulink.


3i SlideBook

SlideBook microscopy software enables scientists to acquire and analyze image data across time, color, and specimen locations, with customizable experiment protocols and drivers for hundreds of research instruments. SlideBook supports data import/export with MATLAB, enabling users to call MATLAB to set variables and perform advanced image analysis, and extending SlideBook’s built-in image processing functions. MATLAB scripts can drive live cell experiments by determining regions for capture and photomanipulation.


Xilinx Zynq-7000 All-Programmable SoC

The Xilinx® Zynq®-7000 All-Programmable SoC combines a dual-core ARM® Cortex®-A9 with Xilinx 7-series FPGA logic on a single chip. As a result, users can integrate camera control and image processing functions in a single device while enabling hardware acceleration of video analytics. Evaluation kits include hardware I/O, design tools, IP, and pre-verified reference designs. MATLAB, Simulink, HDL Coder™, Embedded Coder®, and Vision HDL Toolbox™ support the design and simulation of image processing applications and automated deployment to the Zynq device.

Published 2016 - 93054v00