display a webcam image on labview

[korkizzle]

hello,

we are student and we are trying to display a usb webcam image on labview 7.0.

Could you explain us how can we do that please?

thanks

[Chris Davis]

hello,

we are student and we are trying to display a usb webcam image on labview 7.0.

Could you explain us how can we do that please?

thanks

You've asked an interesting question, I'll give a couple of answers.

Solution 1: Purchase an ActiveX toolkit to read image data from webcams. My favorite is VideoCapX from www.fathsoft.com. It costs $80 and not only allows you to display the video from any WDM source, but also record that video, take snap shots from that video, replay a recorded video, recompress a recorded video, record striaght to MPEG2 (if your hardware supports it), broadcast the video via HTTP, and many many other things which I can't recall. As a student I know you may be saying $80 is a lot of beer and pizza, but it will make whatever project you are working on so much easier you will be thankful you spent the money. They give you a free fully functional version to work with, and it pops up a dialog every now and then to let you know you are using the demo version.

Solution 2: NI has a free USB driver for WDM sources, but it requires you to have LabView 7.1 and Vision Assistant 7.1 which may be out of the question.

Solution 3: Roll your own DirectX DLL that will talk with the camera. I don't know if the $80 you saved will buy enough pizza and beer to make this worthwhile.

Solution 4: Look at the free crossplatform (windows and mac) QuickTime library that has been around for a few years, it may do everything you want, if all you want to do is display the image. I tried using it about a year ago, but have lost track of it since then.

All of these solutions will require some level of LabView experience. If you don't have much experience, this may not be the best project to learn LabView with.

Chris