Frame grabbers at Vision 2009

In the past, when we’ve talked about conferences for video processing and high-speed graphics, they’ve tended toward the likes of SIGGRAPH or the International Broadcasting Conference. With FPGAs moving more into industrial applications of video, with higher-speed networks than factory floors employed in the past, it’s time to pay more attention to the likes of Vision 2009, the Stuttgart conference on machine vision.

This week, Matrox is coming to Vision with an extension of its Radient eCL CameraLink frame grabber, which now supports the Stratix IV from Altera. Pierantonio Boriero, product manager for industrial imaging at Matrox, cited the parallelism and programmability of FPGAs as representing a good alternative to traditional image or signal processing architectures in tasks such as semiconductor wafer inspection and flat panel display inspection.

It will be interesting to see if further announcements from Stuttgart come from the likes of Xilinx, Actel, or Lattice, and whether this suggests broadening use of FPGAs in machine vision.