User`s guide

Getting Started Doing Image Acquisition Programmatically
1-9
Step 1: Install Your Image Acquisition Device
Follow the setup instructions that come with your image acquisition device. Setup
typically involves:
• Installing the frame grabber board in your computer.
• Installing any software drivers required by the device. These are supplied by the
device vendor.
• Connecting a camera to a connector on the frame grabber board.
• Verifying that the camera is working properly by running the application software
that came with the camera and viewing a live video stream.
Generic Windows image acquisition devices, such as webcams and digital video
camcorders, typically do not require the installation of a frame grabber board. You
connect these devices directly to your computer via a USB or FireWire port.
After installing and configuring your image acquisition hardware, start MATLAB on
your computer by double-clicking the icon on your desktop. You do not need to perform
any special configuration of MATLAB to perform image acquisition.
Step 2: Retrieve Hardware Information
In this step, you get several pieces of information that the toolbox needs to uniquely
identify the image acquisition device you want to access. You use this information when
you create an image acquisition object, described in “Step 3: Create a Video Input Object”
on page 1-12.
The following table lists this information. You use the imaqhwinfo function to retrieve
each item.
Device Information Description
Adaptor name An adaptor is the software that the toolbox uses to communicate
with an image acquisition device via its device driver. The
toolbox includes adaptors for certain vendors of image acquisition
equipment and for particular classes of image acquisition devices.
See “Determining the Adaptor Name” on page 1-10 for more
information.
Device ID The device ID is a number that the adaptor assigns to uniquely
identify each image acquisition device with which it can