MetriCam Developer Documentation

1.0

Author:

Michael Balda <michael.balda@metrilus.de>

Welcome to the MetriCam API documentation. This page gives a short overview of the MetriCam components and layout.

General

MetriCam is the first common and unified real-time 3-D camera SDK for .NET. It supports all major Time-of-Flight cameras from Fotonic, Mesa Imaging and PMD Technologies. Furthermore, MetriCam also includes support for popular PrimeSense sensors like Kinect and Xtion Pro.

It's major features are:

• thread-safety
• unified interface for all cameras
• events for camera connects and disconnects
• multi-camera management
• features all fundamental camera features
• extendable with other sensors

Components

MetriCam consists of the following components:

• MetriCam: Camera support modules for Fotonic, Mesa, PMD, XtionPro and DirectShow-compatible WebCams.
• CameraTester: A simple example application for MetriCam usage.

MetriPrimitives contents

MetriCam

Contains all the relevant interfaces and classes representing the various supported cameras.

• IMetriCamera: General interface implemented by all MetriCam camera wrappers.
• SupportedCameraTypes: Lists all supported cameras and defines unique names and identifiers used thoughout all MetriCam classes.
• Fotonic: Wrapper for the Fotonic SDK supporting the B, C and D series.
• MesaCamera: Wrapper for the Mesa SDK supporting SwissRanger 3000 and SwissRanger 4000.
• PMDCamera: Wrapper for the PMD SDK supporting CamCube2, CamCube3 and CamBoard (O3 and S3 support is planned).
• WebCam: Support for DirectShow-compatible cameras (such as WebCams).
• XtionPRO: Wrapper for the OpenNI SDK. General support of all OpenNI-compatible cameras is planned.

CameraTester

This is a very basic test application for all MetriCam wrappers. It supports connecting, fetching and displaying frames and disconnecting a single camera.

Minimal Example

The following code sample demonstrates how two use MetriCam with a PMD CamCube.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using MetriCam;

namespace Simple
{
    class Program
    {
        #region Private Fields
        private static IMetriCamera camera;
        #endregion

        #region Main
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Create new CamCube object.");
                camera = new CamCube3();

                Console.WriteLine("Connect CamCube.");
                camera.Connect();

                Console.WriteLine("Get all supported channels of the camera.\n");
                for (int i = 0; i < camera.NumberOfChannels; i++)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("\t - " + camera.GetChannelName(i));
                }

                Console.WriteLine("\nTrigger a new frame.");
                camera.Update();

                Console.WriteLine("Receive distance image of camera.");
                float[,] distances = camera.GetChannel(camera.GetChannelId(ChannelType.ChannelNames[(int)ChannelType.ChannelNameIndex.DISTANCE]));

                Console.WriteLine("Distance in pixel (20, 30): " + distances[20, 30]);

                Console.WriteLine("Change integration time to 400");
                ((CamCube3)camera).SetIntegrationTime(400);

                Console.WriteLine("Disconnect CamCube.");
                camera.Disconnect();
            }
            catch (System.Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);               
            }
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
        #endregion
    }
}