Re: plugIn for FireWire Camera

Posted by Gabriel Landini on Nov 24, 2006; 8:51am
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/plugIn-for-FireWire-Camera-tp3700940p3700945.html

Hi David,
Thanks for your comments.

On Friday 24 November 2006 03:01, David Hitrys wrote:
> 1.  Being able to control the camera from ImageJ would, indeed, be useful.
> However, due to the nature of the existing plug-in, this is currently not
> possible.  We will look into other avenues of supporting scripting in
> ImageJ, though we currently do not have concrete plans at this point.

> 2.  The Snap button is currently the only mapped function to ImageJ.

That is right, it would be ideal to have another similar plugin that does only
this:

When called, snap a shot that is then sent to IJ.

That is all. I am sure that your engineers would have little trouble doing
this, since it would be a direct call to the snap function, bypassing all the
dialog & button pressing (i.e. not waiting for the button to be pressed).

> Since the average feature is part of QCapture Suite and not the plugin and
> since ImageJ has its own average function, this feature would be redundant.

Not quite. The averaging function in IJ requires a stack of images already
grabbed first. So, really there is no straightforward way to do this from IJ
with the current plugin. Sure one can use the IJ_Robot to capture several
shots, but it is not elegant at all (one has to add timers to wait for the
image to be transferred to IJ, wait for the number of grabbed images, make
sure that the plugin windows is in the right position for the robot to click,
etc).

The QCapture Suite, however has its own handling of this which is a lot
quicker. There would be a huge advantage of having the average grabbing
function available from IJ.
Again, one plugin that just returns n averaged frames would be excellent.

Anyway, isn't the IJ plugin just a wrapper for some of the QCapture functions?
The plugin calls a dll, could the average capture be called this same way?

> 3.  We do not have a Linux plugin currently because we do not have QCapture
> for Linux.  Since our plugins invoke a subset of the QCapture program, this
> would not be possible in Linux.

However, it is possible for QImaging to provide a generic linux executable
that when called just grabs one shot (no buttons, no menu), so from a plugin
one can call the executable via a system call. I am sure that this can be
done, but unfortunately the SDK has some problems in suse linux, so I cannot
try it.

The current QCapture plugin is nice, but it is only suitable for manual
grabbing. This, unfortunately, limits its usefulness.
One cannot do things like autofocusing, stage controlled acquisition, time
lapsed imaging, automatic ratio background correction, etc.
What I am suggesting is much simpler and much more powerful and would allow
all of that.
(I can't believe that Q does not see this as a strong selling point, specially
when there are IJ developers willing to produce such plugins!).

Thanks for listening.
Regards,

Gabriel