CoaXPress Standard Gains Approval

The Japan Industrial Imaging Association (JIIA), host of the CoaXPress high-speed digital interface standard for imaging applications, recently announced that the first edition of the standard has been overwhelmingly approved by its Working Group as a JIIA standard for public release. Additionally, the AIA/EMVA CoaXPress Liaison Group, which consists of members from the US-based Automated Imaging Association (AIA) and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), also have given their approval, paving the way for global adoption in early 2011. Representatives from both groups voted on the standard during the past month and the results were released in December 2010, showing a total of 31 votes in favor, none opposed and 2 abstentions.

JIIA also announced the launch of a procedure to test and approve CoaXPress devices as officially compliant products. This compliance program will also manage permission to use the CoaXPress name and logo. Additional details of how this process will work will be announced in the first quarter of 2011.

Following this successful ratification of the standard, reference JIIA NIF-001-2010, the CoaXPress specification will now go through a three-month international appeal process, during which interested parties can comment on a wide range of technical and legal areas. The result of this process, which has been agreed upon by JIIA, AIA and EMVA, will be announced at Automate 2011 in Chicago, and will pave the way for CoaXPress to become an international standard.

“We are well on our way to making CoaXPress a global and widely adopted standard for high-speed digital image data transmission,” said Tadashi Miyazaki, chair of JIIA CoaXPress Workgroup. “The voting results demonstrate the universal approval for the technical validity of the approach, as well as the support for a next-generation method for enabling flexible, high-speed connectivity between the components of imaging systems, including multiple cameras, frame grabbers, and image-processing systems.”

The successful ratification of the standard culminates a productive year that began with CoaXPress earning the Vision Award at Vision 2009 in Stuttgart, Germany. Since then, support for the standard has been widespread, with more than 30 companies providing feedback on the specification development; an Adopters Group formed to investigate a variety of applications; and involvement from the AIA and EMVA through an active CoaXPress Liaison Group.

“I’d like to thank and congratulate the many people and organizations that contributed to helping us reach this milestone for CoaXPress,” said Jochem Herrmann, chairman of the CoaXPress Consortium. “I am pleased with the broad ranging support and input the specification has received, which confirms the industry demand for a solution of this type. We are also pleased to see the start of the product compliance process so the benefits of CoaXPress can quickly get into system developers hands.”

CoaXPress is a digital interface specification that allows the transmission of high-speed data from a device, for example a camera, to a host such as a frame grabber in a PC, at a speed of up to 6.25 Gbps over a single coax cable. The device need not be a single camera – it could, for example, be an interface device that concatenates data from several cameras – because CoaXPress has the ability to carry many channels of image data and metadata.

For communication from host to device, there is a 20 Mbps “uplink” that allows for control and configuration data. For even higher speeds, links may be concatenated to provide multiples of the single coax bandwidth. Finally there is also power provided over the cable at 24 V, up to 13 W per cable. In addition to the simplicity and clear benefits of using coax, CoaXPress works over relatively long cable lengths, depending on the precise cable type – up to 40 m at 6.25 Gbps and much further at lower speeds.

One of the benefits of CoaXPress is the ability to use rotary joints and sliprings. These are typically used in defense, robotic, surveillance and broadcast applications where continuous panning can be a requirement. The availability of low cost radio frequency rotary joints opens up many options for high-resolution and multiple image/data channels in continuous panning applications. The significant interest in this from markets outside machine vision led to the formation of an “Adopters Group” whereby organizations for which machine vision is not a significant part of their business may gain access to the CoaXPress specification.

CoaXPress was originally developed by Adimec, Active Silicon and Components Express using chip technology from EqcoLogic. First products were demonstrated in Stuttgart, Germany, at Vision 2009. These included cameras from Adimec, frame grabbers from Active Silicon and cables from Components Express.

For more information, visit: www.jiia.org