Broadcasting

Many machine vision applications involve a single host computer acquiring data from a single industrial camera. Other machine vision applications acquire data from multiple industrial cameras concurrently. With the broadcasting feature, a machine vision application can run on multiple host computers while acquiring data from a single camera, as shown in the following figure.

The camera broadcasts video data on the camera bus and all the connected host computers receive the same image data. In this scenario, one host computer is designated as the controller. The controller is responsible for starting/stopping the camera feed. There can be only one controller per camera. The listeners obtain image data from the camera bus. The listeners do not control the camera in any way. There may be one or more listeners per camera.

Broadcasting has many uses. Computationally intensive tasks can be spread across different machines, thus effectively distributing computations. Multiple host computers can also perform redundancy checks. Additionally, listeners can monitor the current status of a headless system.