Setup and Usage

Requirements

The tiscamera project has to be installed. If tiscamera has been compiled manually the flag BUILD_TOOLS has to be enabled. tcamdutils will only work if a ‘The Imaging Source’ camera is present on the system.

Dependencies

  • tiscamera-tcamprop (provided via tiscamera packet)

Automatically installed via apt:

  • libgstreamer1.0-0
  • libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-0
  • libgirepository-1.0-1

Usage

The tiscamera-dutils are a drop-in for our open source gstreamer elements that are optimized for performance. They contain additional properties like tonemapping.

If you are using the tcambin for image retrieval you can continue doing so. The tcambin detects the presence of the tcamdutils and uses them automatically.

To disable this behavior set the property use-dutils to false.

.... ! tcambin use-dutils=false ! ....

The tcamdutils have an automatic load balancing that distributes the image analysis / correction on all available cores.

Using 10/12/14/16 bit bayer formats

These formats have to be explicitly selected to be used.

Manual Pipeline

tcamsrc ! video/x-bayer,format=bggrXX ! tcamdutils ! ...

Automatic Pipelines

If you want to use the tcambin you can set the property device-caps. This influences the internal caps negotiation to only allow that format.

tcambin device-caps="video/x-bayer,format=bggr12" ! video/x-raw,format=BGRx ! ....

The internal pipeline would look like:

tcamsrc ! video/x-bayer,format=bggr12 ! tcamdutils ! ...

The pipeline that is used can always be found in the gstreamer log output of tcambin. See https://www.theimagingsource.com/documentation/tiscamera/logging.html#gstreamer

Restrictions

This release (v0.13.0) currently supports

  • amd64/x86_64 and (SSE 4.1 minimum, can use AVX2 when available)
  • arm64/aarch64
  • armhf on Pi4

Unsupported devices

Not supported are the following devices:

  • DFK AFU050-L34

    Using them with tiscamera and tiscamera-dutils will likely prevent image retrieval.