GenICam™

What is GenICam?

GenICam™ is an international standard that allows a single application programming interface (API) to control any compliant video source, regardless of its vendor, feature set, or interface technology (GigE Vision®, Camera Link®, etc.).

What are the benefits?

The GenICam standard benefits everyone involved in the design, deployment, and maintenance of high-speed digital video sources. In particular, application developers employ GenICam to:

Simplify application integration;
Write cleaner code;
Abstract-out complexity;
Work with new cameras, even those never before seen; and
Identify features of any camera.

What is the relationship of GigE Vision to GenICam?

The GigE Vision specification relies on GenICam to describe the features supported by the video source. This description takes the form of an extensible mark-up language (XML) device description file respecting the syntax defined by the GenApi module of the GenICam specification.

When was it established?

A GenICam working group was first established in 2003 and the standard was officially launched in September of 2006.

How is it managed?

The GenICam standard is hosted by the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) a trade association for the machine vision industry that represents 20 nations.

The EMVA publishes the GenICam standard text and oversees the compliance process. Technical evolution is handled by the EMVA's GenICam Technical Committee, made up of representatives from every major sector of the vision systems industry.

What is Pleora's role?

A Pleora representative serves as a member of the EMVA GenICam Standard Committee and Pleora makes significant contributions to all of the standard's technical subcommittees.

Technical Summary

GenICam consists of four modules:

GenApi: This module defines the format of an XML file that captures the features of a device. GenApi also specifies how to access and control the features. All GenICam-compliant devices must contain an XML file that conforms to this format.
Standard Features Naming Convention: This module standardizes the names of more than 220 commonly used camera features. To comply with GigE Vision, seven of the features are mandatory. The rest are either recommended or optional. Compliance with the naming convention is important for interoperability, as it frees application software from the complexity of situations where vendors call the same feature by different names, such as, 'Brightness' and 'Gain'.
GenTL: This module defines a software interface for accessing image data from a generic transport layer.
CLProtocol: This module allows cameras that comply with the Camera Link® standard to be accessed through GenApi. It defines the format of a dynamic-link library that converts a vendor-specific serial protocol to a GenApi interface.

There are two levels of compliance to GenICam:

GenICam-compliance: where a product either provides or interprets a compliant XML file.
GenICam TL-compliance: where a product exposes a transport layer compatible with GenTL.

To learn more

More information about this vision standard and how interoperability can benefit a vision system’s networked video design and performance is happily shared by our GenICam experts simply by contacting us.