What is the fastest mode of transferring the images from a digital camera (video/still camera) to a portable computer available today?.

This is for industrial application purposes. Images (resolution 640 x 480) have to be captured and transferred to a computer, preferably a portable computer to do image processing for grading purposes. Speed is the major criterion.

-- Jeyam Subbiah (jeyamkondan@yahoo.com), March 24, 2000

Answers

Your question is not perfectly clear. Are you willing to take the flash memory card out of the camera and then stick the little memory card into an adaptor in your laptop? If you are, then the fastest way to get, say, 48 megabytes of images off of your digital camera in less than a minute is to buy an eight-dollar PCMCIA adapter for flash cards from buy.com. And use a camera that takes flash memory (Canons, Nikons, Kodaks etc.) The resolution you mention is so little that almost any digital camera would work. The 300-500 dollar Kodaks have great color, even in the low-end units.

Let's see, a 640x480 JPEG image will probably be about 5 to a megabyte, you can copy about 250 of them from a flash card adapter into your laptop in about a minute.

-- Russell Bozian (finaldesign@hotmail.com), March 25, 2000.

Thanks for the reply. This is for real time application. A digital camera will be encased in a stand with lighting system and will be used to take images of ribeye on the beef carcasses on the slaughtering floor. The image has to be acquired and processed online and grade of the carcass should be determined in less than 10 s. (I opted for lower resolution for faster image processing operations). Each image (uncompressed - about 1 MB size) has to transferred real-time in less than 1 s to the labtop camputer.

I would like to know, how to configure this system, i.e, bus type etc. Thanks in advance.

-- Jeyam Subbiah (jeyamkondan@yahoo.com), March 25, 2000.

For the application and resolution you mention, I'd consider an inexpensive CCD or CMOS video camera and a frame grabber. If for nothing else, just to eliminate moving parts and complex mechanisms in a cold environment. If you have constant lighting, and the focus can be fixed, you really don't need a shutter and focusing mechanism, etc. With a video camera that has reasonable depth of field and a manually adjustable focus lens, it would probably be pretty straight forward. You might have to look around a bit to find a frame grabber that comes with a C or Basic interface to simplify programming, but I'm sure there are several on the market. Some interface via parallel port, but I imagine ISA expansion cards with a direct bus interface are more common.

How are you handling the framing and image analysis and what are the grading selection criteria?(size? marbling?) Are the ribeyes already broken down or are they part of hanging beef in quarters? I can imagine some interesting positional and size variations in a slaughterhouse assembly line operation... Doesn't seem like it'd be as easy as detecting whether soup cans are labeled. :-)

By the way, I design, manufacture, and troubleshoot pc based industrial control systems. If you want to bend an ear, drop me a line. My first real summer job was in my uncle's meat market. ;-)

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), March 25, 2000.