ibaCapture is a video capture system designed for recording video from multiple cameras simultaneously. It can be connected to ibaPDA, which allows synchronized recording of video and measured data.

This synchronized connection of image information and measured data allows recognizing relations between process and measurement and improves the quality of data analysis.

This document describes the connection and handling of cameras which support the GigE Vision® standard, so-called GigE cameras. When connecting GigE cameras to ibaCapture Server, some specific information has to be considered.

GigE cameras allow high-speed capturing with frame rates of up to 400 fps, depending on the used resolution. It is recommended to connect GigE cameras to an ibaCapture Server via a dedicated Gigabit Ethernet network card (e. g. Intel® Ethernet Server Adapter I350-T4V2). The mentioned card allows connecting up to 4 GigE cameras. If GigE cameras are used, further system requirements apply, see chapter Requirements. In addition, due to the high demands during video encoding, the requirements in terms of PCI Express bandwidth, processing power and GPU support need to be considered.

When an appropriate network interface is used (e. g. Intel(R) Ethernet-Converged-Network-Adapter X550-T2), it is also possible to connect 10GigE cameras to ibaCapture. With the additional bandwidth, even higher resolutions or frame rates up to 1440 fps can be captured. Be aware that utilizing the full capacity of a 10GigE camera will only allow capturing one camera per ibaCapture Server.

Principle of video processing with GigE cameras

In order to receive video from GigE cameras, a Software Development Kit (SDK) is required to configure the GigE camera and subsequently get the images from the GigE camera. In the next step, the raw images are encoded into a video stream by one of the supported video encoding libraries. ibaCapture supports the Pleora eBUS SDK and video encoders as shown in the figure below.

The SDK to be used has to be licensed and installed separately.

ibaCapture also supports multicast mode with multicast capable GigE cameras. In multicast mode, raw images from GigE Vision cameras can be streamed to multiple receivers. A specific camera type Pleora eBUS SDK Multicast slave enables the ibaCapture Encoder to subscribe to the multicast stream of the GigE Vision device. The camera type makes use of the Pleora eBUS SDK internally. Thus, an installation of the eBUS Runtime Package is required. Multicasting can be enabled/disabled using any GigE Vision compliant third party software, but not with ibaCapture. More information can be found in chapter Pleora eBUS SDK Multicast slave camera configuration