frame grabbing - LabView crashes on large image streams

[Nasgul]

I am reading image streams from four Silicon Imaging SI-3170 color cameras that output 12-bit Bayer BG frames, 1920x1080, at 30fps and attempting to display/manipulate the four streams at the same time. LabView crashes (to the point of freezing the system) if I try to stream more than two of these image streams at a time. The stream will work for a few seconds, then crash. System is octal-core and has plenty of horsepower (and 64GB RAM), and the streams are (now) running completely in parallel. Has anyone dealt with multiple large image streams like this?

[BCho]

Hey Nasgul,

My first question is what hardware are you using to capture from your images? Are you using four individual frame grabbers? It seems that you can acquire from two of your cameras at a time just fine, it this phenomenon independent of which frame grabbers you are acquiring from? What version of LabVIEW and the Vision Development System are you working with? What does your code look like and what sort of processing are you attempting to do? Do you see the same sort of hang/crash if you just try to grab your images and don't perform any sort of post processing?

I apologize for answering your question with a series of questions, but hopefully answers to some of these questions will shed some light on your system.

[Nasgul]

Thanks for the reply! I am using 4 Pleora GigE Vision interface cards (Cameralink-to-GEV ethernet) connected to an Intel TigerStack II ethernet router. LabView 8.6. There doesn't appear to be a difference which cards I use to grab. I removed all the post-processing and the computer still hangs. I think there may be an issue with the PCI bus speed, but am not sure.

[machineofjoy]

Although there may be more to the story, if you are using the PCI bus, you are exceeding its bandwith.  At 8-bits deep, each camera is preducing 62.2 MB per second.  The theoretical limitation of the PCI bus is 132 MB per second...