[s0crates]

Because I was curious as to how much running image processing on a faster processor would speed it up, I tried it on an (admittedly extremely slow - probably under 2 ghz) laptop and got a framerate of 20 at a res of 320x240. This was just a simple loop of getImage; with simple processing (threshold, fill holes, get measurements of particles), it didn't really slow down. At 160x120 it was more like 30 fps. Since it was running locally, outputting the image didn't slow it down.

Something I'm curious about is what the actual framerate of the axis 206 is - ie, not what the specs say, but what it can actually serve. The laptop - running xp - was reporting cpu usage around a consistent 10% or so, so either it was the network - 100 megabit ethernet (12.5 megabytes/sec) or the cpu onboard the camera is too slow to deliver at higher speeds.

I could probably have sped the processing up a bit by running it in separate loops communicating through a global var so it could utilize both processors. Actually, best performance could (I think) be gotten by using a dual core and decoding and processing in one, and acquiring images in another processor/thread.

Based on the results I've gotten, the network/camera seems to be a major bottleneck at higher resolutions, unless much more of the cpu was being used than what was shown. Tomorrow I'll try with the priority set to framerate and see if there's a difference.

Does anyone have something they've written to test the bmp image retrieval capability? I would be interested in tweaking/changing that and posting any changed or improved code... Otherwise, I'll just post any code for it that I come up with.

-jonathan