Intro
Recently Sony released the IMX174 sensor, a 16mm-format global shutter CMOS sensor good for 150FPS at 1920x1200. The sensor is current available in several machine vision cameras for around $1000, including the Point Grey Grasshopper3 and the Basler Ace.
I had been looking for a good high-speed video camera lately that could double as a day-to-day raw camera for general videography; while the Redlake was perfectly good camera, its absurd light requirements, short record times, and general bulk limited it to special occasions. Inspired by Shane's recent success with using a Grasshopper3 on a Freefly rig for general video, I decided to give it a go using a Basler camera and my own spin on what I thought the UI should look like.
The Camera
I managed to hunt the camera in question (acA1920-155uc) in stock at Graftek; it was overnighted to me and the next day I had it in hand. The first thing that struck me was how small the head was - at 29mm on a side the camera was barely larger than a dollar coin. The next thing that struck me was how bad the stock viewer was - AOI didn't work, and recording dumped debayered BMP files frame-by-frame to the disk. Basler promised me that AOI would be implemented soon, but didn't have a good answer for the recording issue ("use Labview" was not a valid answer!)
But as I often say, "its just code"...
First Light
Getting RAW images frame-by-frame out of the camera was easy - there was a Pylon SDK example for grabbing raw framebuffer data. Throughout this project, Irfanview proved to be invaluable for viewing and debayering raw frame data.
It was fairly straightforward to write the raw frames frame-by-frame to disk, but that was good for under 60FPS due to the overhead of file creation. The logical next step was to buffer the images to an in-memory buffer and then flush the buffer several hundred MB at a time to disk - using this strategy I was able to reliably grab at maximum frame rate...
...until about 5000 frames, at which point disk write speeds would plummet to <150MB/s and frames would start dropping like crazy. I spent a day trying to fix this, thinking it was a resource handling issue on my end, until I realized that the SSD on my development machine was nearly full. Most consumer SSD's have terrible write speeds towards the end of their capacities, as they run out of free blocks and have to start erasing and rewriting entire blocks for even small amounts of data. Deleting some files and trimming the drive seemed to fix the issue, and I could record continuously at maximum frame rate (with frames cropped from 1200p down to 1080p) so long as background processes were closed.
Getting a Preview
After much derping with GDI bitmaps and DirectX, I remembered that SDL existed and, as of version 2.0, was hardware-accelerated. A rough preview using terrible nearest-neighbor debayering was easy. Unfortunately, while the chunk-based disk writing scheme significantly boosted storage performance, it also had the side effect of freezing preview during the disk writes. This was OK for low data rates, but not for high frame rates where the disk would be mostly busy.The natural solution was to run the framebuffer update in a separate thread, which was easier said then done - Pylon ostensibly has callback functions that can be attached to its internal grab thread, but enabling callbacks seemed to disable Pylon's internal buffer update. The solution was to write a wrapper around the Pylon InstantCamera object that ran in an SDL_thread and updated an external buffer.
Finding a Host Computer
I wasn't particularly keen on paying $1000 for a Surface Pro 3 and the firesale on obsolete SP1's had largely ended, but fortunately the Dell Venue 11 Pro uses an M.2 SSD in the Core i3 and i5 versions and costs about $300 refurb. The stock SSD is somewhat lacking - it tops out at 300MB/s and needs a little bit of warming up in the form of a few hundred frames written before it can sustain this speed, but was OK to start with.
Also worth noting at this point I ran into random dropped frames, which turned out to be a crappy USB cable; unlike USB 2.0, USB 3.0 actually needs a good cable to sustain maximum transfer rate.
The horrible nearest-neighbor preview also looked pretty awful on the Venue's low-DPI screen (1080p on 11" versus 1600p on 13" on the laptop I had written the code on), so it was time to write a quick-'n-dirty software bilinear debayering function. It runs a bit hot (~40% CPU on the Venue) but seems good enough for 30FPS preview. There were also considerable tearing problems, which turned out to be a combination of thread contention in the buffer update code and a lack of Vsync during the screen update.
Better Post-processing
At this point I could grab raw ADC data to disk, but that wasn't too useful for producing viewable videos. I wrote a quick player that used bilinear debayering to preview the videos, and used Windows file associations to avoid having to write an actual GUI for it (this also made it more touch-friendly; also, cool trick: the Windows "Open With" menu option passes the file name as argv[1] to the program it calls). The 's' key in the player cycles between LUTs (currently there are linear, S-Log, Rec709, and an curve of my own creation that I thought "looked good"), 'd' dumps .RAW files for Irfanview or dcraw, and 'b' dumps bilinear debayered BMP's.
I also wanted better debayering without actually having to write a better debayer-er. After scrolling through more lines of pure global-variable based C than I ever wanted to (its somewhat horrific that most of the worlds' raw photo handling stems from that mess), I figured out how to add support for new formats to dcraw. For metadata-less files, dcraw picks the file type based on file size.
Sensor performance
The chart says it all:
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| Stops of DR versus stops of gain |
Downloads
Download the package here. You will need the Visual C++ runtime DLL's, Basler's Pylon 4 runtime (you'll probably want to uninstall Pylon 5), an acA1920-155uc camera, a USB 3.0 port, and a reasonably fast SSD. Use Pylon Viewer to set the bit depth and use either grab_12p_fs or grab_8_fs to record files. To use the player, associate .aca files with play_12p.exe and .ac8 files with play_8.exe. Inside the player, 'd' dumps RAW frames, 'b' dumps BMP's, and 's' cycles between curves.
