Industrial camera is an indispensable part of modern industrial automated production. As an important machine vision component, it can quickly and accurately acquire various information in the production process, such as position, size, color, etc. through image acquisition and data processing. It is widely used in product quality inspection, production process control, automated assembly line operation, etc., which greatly improves production efficiency and product quality.

Gain adjustment is one of the important functions of industrial cameras, which refers to the amplification or reduction of image signals captured by the camera. It can help industrial cameras adapt to different application scenarios and needs, improve image quality, detection accuracy and speed, and reduce noise interference, so as to better meet the needs of industrial automation production.

The principle of pickup gain in industrial cameras mainly involves both analog gain and digital gain.

Analog Gain: Analog gain is achieved by adjusting the electronic amplification of the camera. The image signal is amplified by an analog circuit before the camera captures the image signal. The amount of analog gain depends on the electronic amplification and the sensor type. When lighting conditions are poor or the contrast of the target object is low, increasing the analog gain can increase the intensity of the image signal, thereby improving the brightness and contrast of the image. However, increasing the analog gain also increases the noise level of the image, so there is a trade-off between image brightness and noise level.

Digital Gain: Digital gain is achieved by increasing the pixel values after the camera has captured the image signal. The raw image signal captured by the camera is converted into digitized pixel values after analog-to-digital conversion, and digital gain is a linear amplification of these pixel values. Digital gain does not introduce additional noise, so it can effectively increase the brightness and contrast of an image. Digital gain can be realized by software or hardware, where hardware is usually implemented using technologies such as DSP (Digital Signal Processor) or FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).

In short, the principle of industrial camera image acquisition gain is realized by adjusting the analog gain and digital gain of the camera. In practical applications, it is necessary to reasonably adjust the gain size of the camera according to different lighting conditions and image quality requirements. At the same time, it is also necessary to combine other parameters and indicators, such as resolution, exposure time, sensor type, etc., in order to achieve the best image acquisition results.