Image processing solutions. Digital color and grayscale cameras with image post processing hardware can be easily integrated in customized chassis. Both of these components are already embedded in several high speed scanners. This camera solution can be the heart of a fast OCR reader and pattern recognition solution.

Line Color Camera Electronics

The electronics of the BAPis line camera can capture RGB images with different resolutions. The resolution depends on the optical part of the camera, light system, and set up parameters of the camera. The camera is able to scan images with defined resolution, depending on the active number of pixels.
Not only the resolution can be customized, but also the type and number of images the camera has to deliver in a single scan. Using integrated online digital dropout filter, the camera can deliver color or grayscale images. The bi-tonal image for OCR purposes can be generated from the filtered image. There are several processing options available already in the camera, e.g. horizontal and/or vertical anti-aliased re-scaling – allowing to get images in resolutions different from the native optical resolution.

The BAPis line color camera can be implemented (together with an image processing board) in different paper transport systems to scan images up to 500ppm DIN A4 format with 200dpi. It can be used not only for check and giro processing but also for generic document management and archiving applications like in book scanner. The camera design is modular and can be easily customized for individual transport systems.
Due to camera signal splitter, one camera can be connected to many image processing units, to accelerate image processing.


Line Grayscale Camera Electronics

The electronics of the BAPis grayscale line camera is capable of capturing the gray image with different resolutions. The resolution depends on the optical part of the camera, light system, and set up parameters of the camera.
Further features of the camera are an adjustable line length, a selectable working frequency, an extreme image quality due to true 12-bit processing, and image output as well as a precise, curve based contrast and brightness enhancement through LUT.

Examples for possible applications are not in paper transport systems only, but also industrial, scientific, and security usage. There material quality checking sometimes bases upon images of an object. As a lot of algorithms base upon grayscale images, captured with high number of grayscale levels, they can be used as well for industrial applications like surface analyze algorithms, detecting bacteria on the surface, as one example, just like all in medical areas that base upon 12 to 16 bit grayscale images. Finger print recognition algorithms base upon 12 bit grayscale images, too. Another example is a quality check algorithm for metal facing, e.g. motor cylinder surface.

Due to camera signal splitter, one camera can be connected to many image processing units, to accelerate image processing.


Line Grayscale/Color Area Camera

The color/grayscale digital area micro camera design is extremely compact on one hand, and very flexible on the other. There are interchangeable capture, processing, and interface modules, which allow to adapt the camera to various customer demands.
The camera may deliver video stream via CameraLink, and by that it can be connected to BAPis' image processing unit IE64_HS, as well as to any other grabber. Several image processing / transformation options may be done already in the camera, due to the build-in powerful FPGA chip. With highly adjustable shutter, flexible trigger control options, adjustable resolution and frame rate, the same unit may be used for different purposes. Further features of the camera are a maximum pixel frequency of 30 MHz, with maximum resolution of 782 x 582 @ 60 FPS. The maximum frame rate is 250 FPS in center scan mode and the shutter speed is adjustable in a range from 500 ns to 60 seconds.
A standard C/CS-lens mount, an ability to control zoom and focus in motorized lenses, an electronic lens aperture control, plus a selection of industry standard output interfaces – makes the camera very easy to integrate in miscellaneous image processing environments.

The BAPis grayscale/color area camera is a flexible tool for motion image capture for industry, surveillance, security and science applications requiring a motion video stream or still picture capture in a high quality color.


CIS Sensor Type WC with BAPis CIS-Interface

The 600dpi color CIS connected to the IE64_HS from BAPis through interface board creates very interesting solutions for color scanners. The image processing board supports two CIS sensors for front- and backside scanning with a throughput up to 160ppm.
The IE64_HS with lot of algorithms for image processing delivers an entire set of operation necessary for color and black-and-white image treatment. In this case the following image functions are included in this solution: Cropping, de-skewing, dynamic threshold, G4 compression, JPEG compression, JPEG2000 compression, drop out color filter.


IE64_HS Image Processing Board

The IE64_HS, based on the DSP, FPGA, and ASIC, has two camera inputs (serial or CameraLink) and is able to acquire many images simultaneously. The customized firmware rotates, crops, binarizes, and compresses (according to CCITT Group IV, JPEG and JPEG2000) the acquired images. The processed images are sent to the host through USB2.0 interfaces. Windows 2000/XP and Windows 7 drivers are supported. Other drivers can be developed custom specified. The IE64_HS can be installed as embedded system in any device, which has to perform complicated image processing functions in a limited timeframe.


File Converter K2 Box

The K2_HS converter translates the input images: BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF to JPEG, and JPEG2000 with custom compression ratio or bi-tonal TIFF with G4 compression. The converter box API allows also to cover the output JPEG2000 stream with the DICOM frame. The BAPis K2Box is a standalone device connected to the host via USB2.0 interface (up to 21 MB/s).
The K2Box is compliant with JPEG2000 specifications ISO/IEC 15444-1 and 15444-6.

The converter box API allows also to process RAW format CR2 from Canon digital cameras. The output can be an uncompressed color TIFF or one of the standard converter box output: JPEG, JPEG2000, bi-tonal TIFF with G4 compression. Decoding of a CR2 file uses advanced de-bayering algorithm with 3 levels of quality.
It is possible to adjust custom color correction, white balance and gamma correction while decoding the pixels from raw format. The additional information from the CR2 header can also be stored. The Cannon camera delivers JPEG or CR2 format images.

The K2Box is a useful tool in all cases where a huge number of images need to be converted in other formats and/or archived. Examples for that are life sciences with its DICOM images in radiology, or libraries, image data bases etc.


Light

LED Light

BAPis LED lamp is a source of strong, homogeneous light. This is useful for lighting a scanning area for fast (e.g. 3m/s paper speed) linear cameras.

Strong light (about 18'000 lx at a distance of 500mm) ensures a high quality of the scanned image, and reaches a lighted area with dimensions about 500 x 60mm. This lamp is based upon Neutral-White LEDs, with well calculated distances between diodes that ensure equal strength of light at each scanned point. Special lenses cause a focused light at a small surface and that is the reason why the light is so strong.
The aluminum PCB embedded in the LED lamp ensures long life of product (approximate lifetime adds up to 10'000 hours). Also the power consumption of the lamp is low (the lamp needs about 26W), comparing to its powerful light. Last but not least, the input voltage (12V) is a standard for many products on the market.

This light system is for high speed scanners (3m/s paper speed), based on cool and warm light LEDs with lenses included.


Image processing Library IPLBV

To use function calls in host only, without any hardware parts, BAPis has developed the DLL with all necessary functions for image processing. IPLBV includes among other things: de-skewing, saturation, compression and decompression (JPEG, JPEG2000, Group IV), adaptive binarization, OCR A/B and barcode recognition. This library is speed and quality optimized and can be used on each MS Windows/XP system.