Acquisition Quickstart Tutorial

No one ever reads this stuff until they have to

The process of acquiring images for scientific analysis is an extremely complicated subject. There are a multitude of combinations of hardware and processes. Which camera is to be used? What shutters and or filters are to be used? Is this experiment multifluorescent, time lapse or z-series? These are just some of the questions that bear on any given experiment.

Basic Acquire

1. Under the Acquire menu select "Acquire…"
   
   
2. Press OK
   
   
3. You are now grabbing live Images (i.e. previewing).

   At this point, you can adjust many of the acquisition parameters (e.g. exposure time and normalization). More on this later.

4. Press OK
   
   
5. You now have an image.

   This is a set of synthesized data created by our VirtualCam, had we not been in such a rush we might be looking at real data right now.

Selecting an acquire device

Before IPLab can capture images it needs to know about your hardware.


1. The "Select Acq. Device" command

   This command allows you to select your camera or frame grabber from a list of installed devices.



2. The "Get Device Info" command

   Information specific to the selected camera may be entered using this command. With some hardware setups this command must be run before proceeding with the acquisition.

Now we repeat the steps above in Basic Acquire.

Doing Real Work

What was all that stuff you flew by earlier? How do I setup this thing to run my experiments?

1. Configurations
   

   A configuration is simply a combination of settings that may be changed without affecting any other configurations. An example of why this might be useful would be focusing. While focusing you may wish to only capture a portion of the full frame or to bin the image and lower the exposure time to increase the speed of the preview. These settings are fine for focusing, but we don’t want to have to reset all these parameters to do our actual acquisition. We can accomplish our goal by having a configuration for focus and another setup to do the final grab.

   
   
   1. IPLab stores five configurations
   2. Configurations can be renamed
   3. Settings can be copied from one configuration to another
   
   
2. The Tabs

   In order to reduce the visual clutter involved in setting the scores of possible settings, we have grouped the parameters into functional blocks. Each of these blocks is contained on a single tab.

   
   
   • Current Settings Tab

   The Current Settings tab give a synopsis of the settings on each of the other tabs.

   
   
   • General Tab

   The general tab allows a user to define:

   
   
   1. Color verses monochrome mode
   2. Whether e Preview Mode is needed to adjust exposure time and size settings
   3. Allows a user to Sum or Average multipe frames
   4. Can Create a Timing Window in Excel format to export to Excel
   
   
   • Exposure Tab

     This tab allows you to adjust the exposure time and/ or select autoexposure.

   
   
   • Size Tab

     Settings involved with the image dimensions and the portion of the ccd to be captured can be set here.

   
   
   • Devices Tab

     If you wish to set up an external shutter that is only open while the camera is exposing, it would need to be set up on this tab. Another function of this tab would be to setup any acquisition device specific parameters.

   
   
   • Time Lapse Tab

     For studies requiring images to grabbed at periodic intervals, IPLab can use the settings on this tab to run the experiment. These settings will be looked at in more depth later in the presentation.

   
   
3. Previewing
   
   
   
   • Configuration

     During the preview it is easy to switch between configurations. This can be used to preview using a "focus" configuration then switch to another before hitting OK to initiate the capture.

   
   
   • Exposure

     The preview may indicate that the exposure time needs to be adjusted. This may be done by typing in a new exposure time or using the spinner control.

     An autoexposure can be done by pushing the AE button. The exposure time shown before the button is pushed will be used as the initial guess.

   
   ROI min/max

   This field reports min and max of the ROI at the time of the last grab.

   
   
   • Tabs

     As in the acquire dialog settings have been grouped into functional blocks.

     
     
     1. Normalization
        1. White and Black Points
        2. Use ROI Min/Max
        3. Show Saturated Pixels
     
     
     2. Size

        The size of the image currently being grabbed can be adjusted by setting it to the size of a full frame or resizing it to only encompass the ROI. The binning can also be changed on this tab.

     
     
     3. Devices

        If a shutter is being used in the current configuration, interactive control of it can be affected with the controls on this tab.

   
   
   • Snapshot

     This will save a copy of the last image grabbed into another window.

   
   
   • Histogram

     A live histogram can be displayed while the preview is active.

   
   
   • Pause/Continue Live Preview

Do it again

The "Acquire (using last config.)" command allows you to repeat the last acquisition without having to return to the dialog or set/reset any parameters.