Leuven, Belgium, 23 April 2014 – Xenics, Europe’s leading developer and manufacturer of advanced infrared detectors and cameras covering the LWIR to the visible realm has released its Bobcat-640 to full-qualification production. Bobcat-640 is the smallest SWIR camera with on-board image processing features making it well suited for industrial machine vision applications such as waste sorting, food inspection, failure analysis, semiconductor inspection, process control, hyperspectral imaging, laser-beam profiling and high temperature thermography. With built-in CameraLink or GigE Vision interfaces Bobcat-640 delivers outstanding value in terms of ROI and short time to market due to easy system integration.
Reaching out to Machine Vision System Integrators
“The machine vision and automation industry is constantly broadening its portfolio with advanced imaging products for new demanding applications”, says Xenics founder and CEO Bob Grietens. “Part of this will result in an increased demand for infrared imaging systems. With its small form factor and improved performance, the Bobcat-640 is perfectly adapted to meet these challenging requirements of next generation machine vision systems.“
With its very compact form factor of 55 x 55 x 72 mm³ for CameraLink and 55 x 55 x 82 mm³ for GigE Vision, Bobcat-640 is the smallest industrial SWIR CL/GigE imaging solution available for industrial vision. It offers excellent low-noise and low-darkcurrent performance at extended operating case temperature ranges of -40°C to 70°C.
Modularity Takes Center Stage
Modularity across a broad variety of specifications and functionalities that systems designers can choose from according to their applications is key. Xenics offers system integrators worldwide an open architecture with control and command of multiple interfaces via CameraLink and GigE Vision. Power over Ethernet is also possible for standalone operation. Analog video and later on CoaXPress are available upon request.
In terms of resolution, Bobcat-640 drives the pixel pitch down to 20μm from conventional levels of 25μm, at a high overall resolution of 640×512 pixels. This efficient optical lay-out makes the new camera compatible with a broad range of exchangeable standard C-mount lenses as well as the full range of other lower-cost lenses.
Faster time-to-market
Versatile on-board image processing is one of the outstanding design features of the Bobcat-640 enabling it to operate as a complete IR camera system. It is userconfigurable with single (GigE Vision) to continuous (CameraLink) non-uniformity correction (NUC), auto gain and offset, histogram equalization (CameraLink) as well as trigger in/out. “In the past,” says Bob Grietens, “users had to perform a lot of image processing in their self-developed software. We have moved this control functionality from the application back to the camera.”
Bobcat-640-CL is compliant with National Instruments and Euresys framegrabbers. Bobcat-640-GigE supports Cognex VisionPro, MVTec HALCON and Stemmer Common Vision Blox imaging software and is GeniCam compatible.
High sensitivity in the SWIR range for specialized quality inspection and high temperature process control
The Bobcat-640 spectral response covers the realm 0.9 to 1.7μm, with a VisNIR option extending the wavelength realm to the visible (0.4μm). As a result, Bobcat-640 substantially increases measurement sensitivity by capturing more light and lowering integration times under difficult lighting conditions.
With its special on-board readout circuitry (ROIC with CTIA topology) the camera delivers uniform and crisp images. The TE-1 temperature stabilization enables the Bobcat-640-GigE to achieve noise levels of less than 90e- (60e- ROIC noise). AD conversion at a high 14 bits delivers high-quality data processing. The Bobcat-640-GigE reaches high frame rates of 100 HZ in full resolution of 640×512. In windowing mode the frame rate can be further increased.
