ZoneMinder Forums

Hello Folks:

I discovered ZM while researching h/w systems in order to build a stereovision system. The system for the start is going to have 2 cameras, but might expand to around 12 cameras. I would like to start with 2 cameras, test the feasibility and then decide whether it can be expanded based on my experience with the pilot system.

The proposed system should be controlled from the computer. That is the computer is going to send commands to the camera. The reason for this is, both the cameras should be synced as close to each other as possible. They would be taking pictures of moving objects. In short these are the rough specifications for the system I am planning to build:

• high resolution cameras, want to capture detail.
• Color camera
• no need for video, still images are fine.
• throughput of camera to be between 5 frames per second (fps) and 20 fps. 10fps ideal. I am willing to sacrifice fps for resolution.
• communicate using a standard high throughput interfaces like usb, ethernet. This is important, since images would be large.
• can be powered externally through power adpaters. ie. not reliant only on battery power.
• transmit images directly to computer rather than storing locally. Note that the computer would be directly connected to the camera and the length of the wire would be maximum 10 meters.
• computer controls the camera: For e.g. computer will send signals to camera when to snap an image or turn off the camera or turn it on or move it to standby mode etc. This communication is done using some standard camera-computer protocol or through sdk provided by camera manufacturer
• cameras that can maintain their fidelity for temperatures in the range of 0C to 60C
• no need for audio
• I don't want embedded webserver etc in the camera. The camera should just take pics and send them to the computer.
• It would be greate if the camera can transmit images in RAW format, or lossless compression that can be decompressed later. But i am not picky about this.

So now the question is:

a) Are there any commodity camera manufacturers whose products meet the above specs. Most of the systems that I came across was for astronomy market.

b) I understand the ZM community is mostly conversant for security and network cameras. I saw some products from Axis, IQeye but they don't meet my specs.

c) Are you aware of any linux based camera controlled software? Again mostly I found systems for astronomy market. One that I found was built for windows: http://www.breezesys.com/PSRemote/index.htm

I am mostly experienced with linux, therefore any camera which integrates better with linux would be ideal. But I am not too picky about that as I can force myself to learn doz.

thanks

xalan wrote: b) I understand the ZM community is mostly conversant for security and network cameras. I saw some products from Axis, IQeye but they don't meet my specs.

c) Are you aware of any linux based camera controlled software? Again mostly I found systems for astronomy market. One that I found was built for windows

A; I'm not aware of any that come close to those specs other than IQ and Axis.
Your not going to find much using a usb other than standard web cams and at high resolution I don't think that you would get much of a fps on the usb's limited bandwidth from two or more cameras unless you use seperate controlers for each.

I would think You could use mjpeg server push and pull synced images for memory on your host but there is certainly nothing I am aware of that has all that you have spec out.

C: Other than ZM for video projects you can check http://www.exploits.org/v4l/