Now: Interface standards expand – FireWire, CameraLink, GigE Vision
FireWire and Universal Serial Bus interfaces were widely adopted in the mid-1990s by machine vision camera companies, but these standards could not support the higher bandwidths of machine vision cameras. Because no high-speed point to point interface formally existed, the Automated Imaging Association formed the CameraLink committee in the late 1990s. Driven by Basler and JAI, the CameraLink standard was introduced in October 2000.
While point-to-point protocol was gaining hold, technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet emerged to challenge the distance limitations of the CameraLink protocol. In 2006, Pleora Technologies pioneered the GigE Vision standard, which incorporated how camera data could be more efficiently streamed, and how systems developers could control and configure devices. In addition, the standard incorporated the GenICam generic programming interface for different types of machine vision cameras.