Datasheet

1MP OV9281 MIPI CAMERA MODULE
www.ArduCAM.com
2
1 Introduction
The Arducam monochrome (B&W) global shutter 1280x800 resolution OV9281 MIPI camera
module is mainly designed for Raspberry Pi boards, and it can be connected directly to RPi’s
CSI-2 camera interface without additional hardware. This camera is based on 1/4-inch Omnivision
OV9281 image sensor which adopts OmniPixel3-GS technology to provide full-frame,
sub-sampled, and windowed 8/10-bit MIPI images, and capable of operating at up to 120fps in full
resolution at 2-lane MIPI bus with complete user control over image quality. The global shutter
technology allows to reduce or eliminate unwanted image artifacts, which occur with traditional
rolling shutter image sensors as a result of motion during image capture. The sensor's global
shutter and excellent low-light sensitivity allow it to be used for any application that needs gesture
detection, head and eye tracking, and depth and motion detection.
Leveraging the industry's smallest global shutter pixel, with 2-lane MIPI output the OV9281 is
capable of capturing 1280x800 resolution video at 120 frames per second (fps), VGA (640x480) at
180fps, QVGA (320x240) at 210 fps with binning, and QQVGA (160x120) at 400 fps with
binning and skipping. The OV9281's high frame rates make it an ideal solution for low-latency
machine vision applications.
For Raspberry Pi platform Arducam developed a proprietary user-land camera driver SDK and
examples which is supports RAW/JPEG/H.264 format, and manual or software auto
exposure/gain/white balance, mirror/flip controls, and even the low-level sensor register access
controls. Although the RPI camera driver is not V4L2 compliance, it is still good for advanced
users who need high frame rate unprocessed RAW video for machine vision and is capable of
doing image processing using OpenCV. This MIPI camera module can be used on other ARM,
FPGA, DSP, or Nvidia Jetson TX1/TX2/Nano hardware platform as well.