Question about setting the bit depth of the USB camera

I can set the bit depth to 8 or 12 bit if I use the third party software (ToupSky) which support my camera. However, there is only one available option in matlab image acquisition toolbox, which is 8 bit. I have installed all the driver support package for this toolbox. My camera is BRESSER deep sky camera. Any suggestions if I want to use 12 bit in MATLAB?

Answer 1

[Brian Hu]

Please refer to the following link for an example to change the bit depth to your camera's native bit depth using the image Acquisition Toolbox.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/351901-how-can-i-log-frames-to-disk-and-show-a-live-view-from-from-a-10-bit-depth-camera

[Wei Han]

Hi. Thank you for your reply. But there is only one format available when I use the preview function, it is RGB24_1920x1080. I think it should be RGB36 if it is 12 bits. And after I change RGB24 to RGB36 and try to run it, the error is like 'The FORMAT specified is not supported by this device. See IMAQHWINFO(ADAPTORNAME)'.

[Brian Hu]

In the documentation link, there is a note under the page for the preview function:

"The Image Acquisition Toolbox™ Preview window and the Preview window that is built into the Image Acquisition Tool support the display of up to 16-bit image data. The Preview window was designed to only show 8-bit data, but many cameras return 10-, 12-, 14-, or 16-bit data. The Preview window display supports these higher bit-depth cameras. However, larger bit data is scaled to 8-bit for the purpose of displaying previewed data. If you need the full resolution of the data, use the getsnapshot or getdata functions."

(https://www.mathworks.com/help/imaq/preview.html)

It seems that if you wish to use the preview function, the Image Acquisition Toolbox only supports up to 8-bit depth.