Check out Christophe Salzmann's QuickTime toolbox. It gives easy
access to the QuickTime compression codecs (MPEG 4 is especially
good). Depending on how much detail there is, you can compress
10-fold or more without much loss, and at your frame rates you can do
this on the fly, and never store the original images.
A customer of mine has a process which takes about 40 seconds and
operates on parts being manufactured. 15 seconds to get the part
into position, 10 seconds to operate on it and 15 seconds to return
the part.
He wants to have color pictures taken for surveillance only - just
to see if the part was mishandled and such. That is, there's
absolutely no requirement for any kind of image analysis.
He initially thought to use a PCI-1411 card with a standard video
camera (PAL in our case) and snap pictures (2 every second while the
part is in transport and 4 per second during the process).
This results in LOTS of pictures which requires LOTS of disk space
and archiving to DVD (about 2 days of pictures and data per DVD).
They do about 10,000 parts each month.
My question is: does anyone have a better idea?
Just thought I'd throw this out to the multitude of brilliant (not
to mention creative) people on this list to see if we've missed
something.
One more thing: the pictures would only be displayed off-line
together with a part's data whenever the user wants. I suspect that
each picture would have to be compressed (JPEG?) to conserve space.
Thanks (in advance),
E. Blasberg
iDAQ Solutions Ltd
--
David Ferster
Actimetrics, Inc.
1621 Elmwood Ave., Wilmette, IL 60091
http://www.actimetrics.com
847/922-2643 Phone
847/589-8103 FAX
