Design of serial image acquisition system based on camera link

It is needed to transmit a large amount of image information stably at a high speed for storage and process when design a testing system. Image data acquired by remote CCD can be transmitted serially in form of LVDS or Hotlink. The data is buffered by ping-pong operation with two SRAMs. And then it is serially transmitted at a high speed to the grabber via Camera Link interface. The grabber can acquire a frame of 128×130 pixels image at a speed of 150 fps (frames-per-second) in LVDS format, or 250×320 pixels image at a speed of 500 fps (frames-per-second) in Hotlink. The top transmission speed can reach 320 Mbps (Mega-bits-per-second). At the same time, it can maintain the stability of high data correctness in the process of high-speed transmission. It is demonstrated that Camera Link can be conveniently applied in high-speed, serial image acquisition. And the experiment results verify that the image acquisition system can realize expected functions.