Pleora hosts successful GenICam™ and GigE Vision® technical meetings

“The fact that so many companies are willing to put their competitive interests aside and work cooperatively on the development of these two standards shows the level of global commitment to their success,” says George Chamberlain, Pleora President. As a key player in standards development, Pleora co-founded the GigE Vision standard and is an active member of both the GenICam and GigE Vision standards’ technical committees.

Three types of events were held over four days: (1) GenICam technical meetings, (2) GigE Vision technical meetings, and (3) a “plugfest” session where attendees tested the interoperability of both standards with numerous products.

Two days of meetings were dedicated to the advancement of the GenICam standard, with a particular focus on the GenICam Standard Features Naming Convention (SFNC). The GenICam committee works year-round on a volunteer basis and meets twice a year, usually once in Europe and once in North America. “As Chair of this most recent set of meetings in Ottawa,” says Vincent Rowley, Pleora Senior System Designer, “I was really pleased with the exceptional attendance levels. As the GenICam standard matures and more advanced features are being incorporated into compliant devices, the SFNC is being expanded.”

With today’s industrial digital cameras offering an ever-growing set of functionalities, the programming has become more complex. The goal of the GenICam standard, and the work of the GenICam committee, is to provide a generic programming interface for vision system products—regardless of the type of interfacing technology.

The latter two days of meetings were dedicated to the ongoing development of the GigE Vision standard. “These meetings were instrumental in the development of Version 2.0 of the standard, which is planned for release in 2011,” concludes Rowley.

The GigE Vision standard allows full interoperability between compliant products from different vendors. Since the launch of the standard in May 2006, most of the world's leading hardware and software vendors for industrial imaging have introduced GigE Vision-compliant products. These products—cameras, video IP engines, converters, video servers, video receivers, control applications, and management entities—all interoperate seamlessly over the Ethernet platform to create video networking solutions for real-time analysis.