Matrox Imaging
| Matrox Imaging | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Private company |
| founding | 1976 |
| Seat | Dorval , Quebec , Canada |
| Number of employees | > 200 (2009) |
| Branch | Image processing |
| Website | www.matroximaging.com |
Matrox Imaging is a division of Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd. (Matrox for short) and develops and sells hardware and software components for medical and scientific image processing and monitoring technology.
The product range includes frame grabbers , intelligent cameras , embedded systems , high-performance computers and an image processing library called the Matrox Imaging Library.
The main location is in Dorval (Québec) near Montreal . Matrox Imaging also has sales offices in England , Ireland and Germany .
history
After it was founded, Matrox presented the first frame grabber called the FG-01 in the early 1980s . This integrated the first 8-bit analog / digital converter produced by TRW . The Multibus card was used together with a Matrox RGB-256 graphics card and allowed a monochrome field to be digitized , which could then be displayed on the graphics card. The successor named VAF-512 followed a little later, which together with the RGB-Graph graphics card was able to digitize, display and save 8-bit full images . The system was supplemented with the alphanumeric color video controller RGB-Alpha, also from Matrox Graphics.
In 1984 the first "all-in-one" frame grabber MIP-512 followed, also for Multibus . The board included a video digitizer, image memory, video output and an ALU for onboard preprocessing. The board was later reissued as VIP-512 for the VMEbus . The main users were research institutions and scientific institutes. One year later, the then new PC / AT platform was introduced with the PIP-512 frame grabber.
In 1987, the MVP-AT was presented, a hardware-accelerated frame grabber that made it possible for the first time to capture and display both black and white and color images and to carry out simple image processing operations with four boards. An optional chip enabled point-to-point operations and the calculation of histograms . The first Matrox image processing library was also supplied, which implemented some morphological operations .
Two years later the Image series came onto the market, again with onboard image processing, but for the first time with four ASICs . An image processing library for the board was also supplied again. The Image series was initially based on the ISA bus, but was ported to the faster EISA in the early 1990s .
In 1993 the first version of the Matrox Imaging Library was published, this time as a hardware-independent image processing library for 16-bit Windows or DOS . In 1994 and 1995 the first PCI- based frame grabbers Comet, Meteor (I and II) and Pulsar came onto the market - developed for 32-bit operating systems, as did version 3.0 of the Matrox Imaging Library for 32-bit Windows, which was introduced in 1995.
In 1996, the Genesis series followed with onboard image processing, which integrated the Texas Instruments TMS320C80 DSP, as well as another ASIC from Matrox. In addition to analog sources, these grabbers also mastered the digital interfaces RS422 and LVDS .
In the years that followed, additional developments followed, including the digital camera link interface. Between 1996 and 2001, Matrox said it sold more than 250,000 frame grabbers.
In 1999, Matrox released their first embedded system called 4Sight. In 2004, Matrox introduced the first intelligent camera called Iris. The Matrox Imaging Library is now available for Windows XP , Windows Vista / Windows 7 and Linux . In mid-2009, Matrox released a high-performance computing system (HPC) called Supersight.
Trivia
An unofficial Video4Linux driver for the analog Meteor II multichannel frame grabber already existed in 2001 , developed by the company emlix , a developer version is hosted at Sourceforge. There is a native Video4Linux driver for the likewise analog CronosPlus frame grabber with the widely used Philips SAA7130 decoder.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Matrox Imaging Web site as of November 13, 2009
- ^ Matrox Press Release. (as of June 9, 2009)
- ↑ emlix Press Release. (from July 4, 2001)
- ↑ Meteor-II Multi-Channel Linux Driver
- ↑ SAA7130 TV tuner card under Linux. How to.