Standards for image input devices: review and forecast
David L. Gilblom · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
Driven by the rapid growth of computer multimedia and digital broadcast television production and facilitated by the ever-increasing speed of digital video processing circuits, the development and issuance of standards addressing the transfer of images continues to accelerate. While this proliferation appears to widen the options available to the systems designer, it also tends to obscure the basic similarities among the various standards without revealing their key differences. Understanding the implications of these differences, especially as they involve critical timing and channel configuration issues, is important to the user who must assure successful video data transfer. Unfortunately, and despite the many projects underway, the available standards defining the interfaces to image input devices remain inadequate to fully support the designer tasked with producing and maintaining high quality video data acquisition. In this review. we w ill consider each of the key interfaces in turn, describe and compare the standardized choices available, point up shortcomings in the application of these choices, describe ongoing work intended to address these shortcomings, and suggest additional standards development which might benefit the user of image input devices. We also hope to help the user to ask the right questions and develop the right answers.