November 5, 1997, Montreal, Quebec, Canada – The Matrox Imaging Products Group, a leader and innovator in providing PC hardware and software development tools to OEMs, system integrators and professional end-users, today announced a new family of high-performance, fully programmable PCI frame grabbers for cost-sensitive vision applications, designed to interface to practically any camera.

The Matrox Meteor-II series builds on the success and industry acceptance of the original Matrox Meteor models introduced in 1994, by continuing to add value to frame grabbers at the lower end of the price spectrum. These boards are based on totally new designs that let developers tackle even more demanding image processing applications with inexpensive solutions.

This latest Matrox hardware and extensive software support empowers those who build vision/imaging systems for industrial inspection and process control, picture archiving and retrieval, robotics, medical visualization, microscopy, traffic control, security and more.

"No other boards in this price range are comparable", said François Bertrand, Director of Sales and Marketing. "There are different models to handle a variety of camera interface requirements. A dedicated video interface ASIC and on-board memory provide a level of performance a notch above your typical frame grabber, and a secondary over-the-top bus provides expansion capabilities to other Matrox boards. There's even a MJPEG codec module available, and most importantly, we offer a common API across Matrox hardware and additional software to take advantage of all this technology quickly and easily."

The Matrox Meteor-II provides standard acquisition capabilities from NTSC, PAL, RS-170 and CCIR sources. Targeted at cost-sensitive applications with no particular display requirements, this board, as well as others in the family, can be used in conjunction with Matrox graphics accelerator cards for superior acquisition and display.

The second family member is called Matrox Meteor-II MULTI-CHANNEL. It captures from analog interlaced or progressive frame scan component RGB; two channel (double speed) analog progressive frame scan monochrome cameras; or multiple standard (RS-170/CCIR) monochrome cameras. Hardware trigger support is available for devices such as asynchronous reset cameras used in inspection type or other machine vision applications requiring synchronization to external events.

The Matrox Meteor-II DIGITAL model lets users take advantage of the better image quality typically available when using digital cameras. Interfacing color/monochrome single or multitap output digital frame or line scan cameras to PCs is supported in RS-422 format and the newer EIA-644 LVDS standard that is being widely adopted by camera manufacturers.

An optional hardware module provides lossy or lossless MJPEG compression and decompression for applications where storage space may be a concern, such as picture archiving and retrieving applications.

An integral component of Matrox Meteor-II boards is the custom-designed Matrox Video Interface ASIC (VIA). This controller first appeared on the award-winning Matrox Genesis PCI image processor and provides real-time image reconstruction and reformatting capabilities. For example, Matrox VIA can take non-consecutive pixel data from time-multiplexed or multitap cameras and reconstruct it in memory in real time.

Matrox VIA's PCI bus master interface lets any Matrox Meteor-II board achieve real-time transfers to display or system memory at up to 130 MBytes/second for uncompromised high-performance imaging. This controller also permits scatter-gather DMA operation for more efficient use of system memory. A VM Channel secondary bus interface, also under Matrox VIA control, provides an additional bidirectional data bus to off-board resources (other Matrox boards) without loading down the PCI bus.

Additional design concerns, such as PCI latency, were addressed with 2 to 4 MBs of on-board memory. This effectively eliminates the possible image data loss in a system with many PCI devices competing for bus bandwidth. Other features include RS-232 serial interface and power output.

Extensive software support is available for rapid application development and deployment. By using Matrox hardware and Matrox Intellicam, an intelligent camera configuration utility, developers can point-and-click their way to supporting almost any camera/input device in a setting that provides instant visual feedback . Once interfacing is complete, they can choose to test or work with images using a Windows-based application called Matrox Inspector, a general image analysis and prototyping tool. Developers can then use the device-independent Matrox Imaging Library (MIL), a comprehensive collection of high-level 'C' functions optimized for Intel MMX technology, to quickly and easily code their imaging applications. MIL contains modules for image processing, blob analysis, pattern matching/recognition, gaging/measurement and OCR.

For more information, contact our Media Relations Team.