Research On Multi-camera High-speed Image Acquisition System

Yunnan Observatory's National Natural Science Foundation and Major Scientific Instruments Project——Solar Observing Facility,a Fiber Arrayed Solar Optic Telescope(FASOT)——requires to acquire images synchronously which is in use of a workstation controling two cameras simultaneously under the action of trigger signals.Data's transmission rate after the images' collection is about 82.5Mb/s.This project also need to save the images to the format of FITS.My research's topic of this dissertation which is a preparatory project for the FASOT project need to build a high-speed image acquisition system which contains multiple cameras and to carry out relevant testing work.The multiple camera high-speed image acquisition system this paper builds achieves image acquition function in using the same personal computer(PC)by controlling two high speed camera which's interface type is different.And the system also completed the system's hardware and software design and the test work.In terms of hardware,a CCD camera with a USB 3.0 interface and a CCD camera with Gig E interface are selected in combination with the requirements of FASOT project data transmission.The system can use a PC to simultaneously control the two cameras for images' simultaneous acquisition in the triggering of outside trigger pulse.In the aspect of software,writing control configuration software to complete functions which conclude realize the camera parameters,single frame image acquisition,real-time display images,software,hardware trigger,memory control,storage,conversion,etc in use of different camera software development kit for secondary development.The system can start to pop up the software interface of two cameras at the same time,and then configure the camera accordingly.The image acquisition software is divided into two modes: the non-hardware triggering mode and the hardware trigger mode.The two cameras operate independently in the non-hardware triggering mode.When the hardware trigger mode,two cameras are in synchronous acquisition state.Memory control is to save data that collected into the buffer in an array or an struct to memory for real-time display and upload to the server or storage.After the completed of software and hardware design,the related functions of software was tested which include the acquisition of images,the trigger of hardware and software,display,the control of memory and the conversion of format.Images' acquisition of synchronization performance test showed that images' synchronization performance can have more than 10 milliseconds difference for different camera under the same external trigger signal;And the windows operating system CPU time slice rotation mechanism for the high-speed image acquisition system of multiple camera has distinct effect on the synchronization performance.