Teledyne Dalsa TurboDrive 2.0 breaks past GigE limits now with 6 levels of compression

Teledyne Dalsa introduces TurboDrive 2.0 for their Genie Nanos

Dalsa Innovator awardWith the introduction of the Genie Nano came Turbodrive which allowed ‘faster GigE than GigE’ speeds. Turbodrive is a lossless hardware encoding scheme that potentially reduces the amount of data to be transmitted from the camera to the computer.  Dalsa’s Nanos, which are priced identical to the competition, offers the users the ability to go faster at no extra cost.  Note that the user can turn on or off the encoding.

However, the encoding scheme is data content dependent, and therefore if your data varies a lot within an image the compression is minimal.  If your data varies a lot from image to image, then using the encoding means that only certain frames will get a speedup resulting in an inconsistent data transfer rate.

Teledyne Dalsa Nano camera

Teledyne Dalsa has just recently introduced TurboDrive 2.0, a firmware upgrade for all Nanos. The major enhancement is that now TurboDrive offers multiple levels of encoding.  Level 0 is lossless, and each successive level has some potential lossy amount.

The table below indicates quality level,  image compression ratio (absolute worst case scenario)  and effective bandwidth gain

As you can see, at level 6, you have a worst case compression of 0.33, yet a speed up of 3.  Note, this is a worst case situation so you might get a speed up of 3x, yet be at 0.8.  The algorithm is data dependent!  (more about this in the tech primer)

Depending on the application, various compression levels provide minimal degradation.  The following images are shown for comparisons using the varying quality levels.

As you can see, even at level 4, there is very little degradation in the image.  It is easy to imagine that with this image, you can still do your image processing yet get a speed up of 68%!

Dalsa Nano Raw Image
Raw Image

Level 0 “Lossless” to Level 6 indicate the quality level in the images.

Dalsa Nano Turbodrive quality level comparisons
Quality level comparisons

Learn more by clicking the icon below for the comprehensive application note!

Teledyne Dalsa Turbodrive application note
To learn more about Teledyne Dalsa TurboDrive 2.0, please download the application note for full details.

1stVision has a ton of resources to learn about TurboDrive technology in general.  Please visit our dedicated Teledyne Dalsa Turbo Drive resource page HERE  

Contact 1st Vision

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