Glossary

A/D reference	Upper threshold of video signal to be digitized. All values above this limit value are digitized to 255. Increasing the reference level results in contrast deterioration and vice versa.
ADC	Analog-to-digital converter (A/D converter).
API	Application programming interface (API). The standard API for Balluff/MATRIX VISION products is called Impact Acquire.
Base address	Starting address from which the memory or register are inserted.
Bpp	Bits per pixel
Bus	A group line via which the various parts of the computer communicate with one another.
BusyBox	Configurable monolithic application including shell and other useful command-line tools - often called the "swiss army knife" for embedded systems. Even desktop distributions are sometimes relying on BusyBox due to its robustness. Please see http://www.busybox.net for details.
CCIR	Comité Consulatif International of the Radio Communications European video standard for 50 Hz gray scale.
CIFS	Common Internet file system (CIFS) replaced Samba in 2006. It gets rid of NetBIOS packets an introduced Unix features like soft/hard links and allows larger files.
Clamp signal	Clamp signal means, that a AC coupled video signal is clamped on the porch to get a signal transfer with less noise and independent from the d.c. voltage portion.
CPU	Central processing unit aka processor.
DAC	Digital to analog converter (D/A converter).
Defaults	Standard system settings.
DHCP	Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). DHCP is a protocol used by networked devices (clients) to obtain various parameters necessary for the clients to operate in an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
Digital I/O	Digital inputs and outputs.
External trigger	External event used to initiate image capture.
False colors	Colors are assigned to gray scale via a look-up table. This allows even small gray scale differences can be displayed clearly.
GDB	GDB, the GNU Project debugger.
GenICam	GenICam stands for GENeric programming Interface for CAMeras. It's a generic way to access and modify device parameters with a unified interface. A GenICam™ compliant device either directly provides a GenICam™ compliant description file (in internal memory) or the description file can be obtained from a local (hard disk etc.) or web location. A GenICam™ description file is something like a machine readable device manual. It provides a user readable name and value range for parameters that are offered by the device for reading and/or writing and instructions on what command must be sent to a device when the user modifies or reads a certain parameter from the device. These description files are written in XML. An excerpt from such a file can be seen in the figure below: Excerpt of a GenICam™ description file (in XML) For further information on this topic please have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenICam. How to get access to a certain feature in an application that works with the GenICam™ interface and for information on the difference between the GenICam™ interface layout and the Impact Acquire interface please have a look at the chapter matching your preferred programming language: "About different interface layouts"
GenTL	GenTL is the transport layer interface for cameras, acquiring images from the camera, and moving them to the user application.
Gigabit Ethernet (GigE)	The term Gigabit Ethernet (defined by the IEEE 802.3-2008 standard) represents various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second (1,000,000,000 bits per second).
GigE Vision™	GigE Vision™ is a network protocol defined and administered by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), designed for the communication between an imaging device and an application. This protocol completely describes: device discovery data transmission image data additional data read/write of parameters. GigE Vision™ uses UDP for data transmission to reduce overhead introduced by TCP. Note UDP does not guarantee the order in which packets reach the client nor does it guarantee that packets arrive at the client at all. However, GigE Vision™ defines mechanisms that can detect lost packets. This allows capture driver manufacturers to implement algorithms that can reconstruct images and other data by requesting the device to resend lost data packets until the complete buffer has been assembled. For further information please have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GigE_Vision The Balluff GigE Vision™ capture filter driver as well as the socket based acquisition driver and all Balluff GigE Vision™ compliant devices support resending thus lost data can be detected and in most cases reconstructed. This of course can not enhance the max. bandwidth of the transmission line thus if e.g. parts of the transmission line are overloaded for a longer period of time data will be lost anyway. Both capture drivers will allow to fine tune the resend algorithm used internally and both drivers will also provide information about the amount of data lost and the amount of data that was re-requested. This information/configuration will be part of the drivers SDK. More information about it can be found in the corresponding interface description. Note On Windows 2000 the filter driver does not support the "Resend" mechanism.
High Dynamic Range (HDR)	The HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode increases the usable contrast range. This is achieved by dividing the integration time in two or three phases. The exposure time proportion of the three phases can be set independently. Furthermore, it can be set, how many signal of each phase is charged.
Horizontal sync	The portion of the analog signal which specifies the line end of the video signal.
Host	Here: the PC
HRTC	With a Hardware Real-Time Controller (HRTC) built inside the FPGA users can define a PLC like sequence of operating steps to control basic time critical functions like exposure time, image trigger and I/O ports. Timing is hard real-time with sub microsecond high resolution.
IDE	a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of a source code editor, a compiler and/or interpreter, build automation tools, and (usually) a debugger.
Image refresh rate	Number of transferred images per second. Normally specified in Hz (e.g. 70 Hz)
Interrupt	Interrupt signal sent to the processor. The program currently running is interrupted and a predefined function is executed.
IPKG	Itsy package management system originally designed for embedded systems. Please have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipkg or a more sophisticated documentation at http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php "Overview_of_the_ipkg_package_management_system" Balluff distributes all non-firmware, i.e. optional software as ipk packages.
IRQ	Interrupt request
ISR	Interrupt service routine
JFFS2	JFFS2 is a file system which supports wear leveling. See also Sources about the JFFS file system: http://sources.redhat.com/jffs2/ http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/faq/jffs2.html
Link Aggregation (LAG)	Dual-GigE cameras need a network interface card with two network interfaces. However, both network interfaces have to work as a unit. Link aggregation (LAG) or bonding is the name of the game and has to be supported by the network interface card's driver. With it you can bond the two network interfaces so that the work as one interface.
LLA	Logical link address (LLA) is a type of mechanism to obtain a valid IP address without a DHCP server being present. Whether an IP address is available or not is resolved using address resolution protocol (ARP) packets. If no ARP response is received on a given address it is considered unused and will be assigned to the interface. LLA space is 169.254.x.y, i.e. 16bit netmask yielding 64K possible device addresses. With Linux you have to add LLA as an additional interface. By default, you can find one interface in Connections: (This description uses "Gnome Network Manager", however using KDE should be similar) In Wired, you can add interfaces via Add:
	In the tab "IPv4 Setting" you have to set "Link-Local Only": After saving, you will find both connections in the summary: Now, you can select the wished connection using the left mouse button in the "Network Manager" menu. In the LLA case it is just the new created connection:
Look-up table	Table of assignments. Here, new gray scale or colors are normally assigned to gray scale. Look-up tables can, however, also be used for any other math functions.
LSB	Least significant bit
LUT	Look-up table
MAC address	Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a quasi-unique identifier attached to most network adapters (NICs) in computer networking.
MTU	Maximum transmission unit (MTU) refers to the size (in bytes) of the largest packet that a given layer of a communications protocol can pass onwards. The default MTU for Ethernet is 1500. The optimum for Gigabit Ethernet is 8000 - 12000. Different MTU settings in the same subnet can cause package losses, i.e. never ever change the MTU unless you know what you're doing. Changing the MTU to other values than 1500 when using file or web services from other computers are almost always a bug. It's save to increase MTU when working in peer-to-peer mode with both devices sharing the same MTU. Please not that few network cards support 16K, most Gigabit Ethernet cards are limited to 9k, some don't support Jumbo Frames (MTU > 1500) at all.
Monochrome	A single-color (black and white) image
MSB	Most significant bit
Impact Acquire	This driver supplied with Balluff products represents the port between the programmer and the hardware. The driver concept of Balluff provides a standardized programming interface to all image processing products made by Balluff GmbH. The advantage of this concept for the programmer is that a developed application runs without the need for any major modifications to the various image processing products made by Balluff GmbH. You can also incorporate new driver versions, which are available for download free of charge on our website: https://www.balluff.com. The SDK documentation of the Impact Acquire can be found at the manuals section.
Netboot	With netboot you can boot a BVS CA-GX camera over network. This is especially useful when several devices share the same pieces of software, i.e. same root file system, which might be subject to change frequently.
NFS	Network File System (NFS) is a network file system protocol, allowing clients to access files over LAN. Given that you need a NFS server are uncommon on Windows, this protocol best fits for Linux-Linux connections.
NIC	Network interface card - synonym for network controller.
Overlapped / pipelined transfer	By default, the steps exposure and readout out of an image sensor are done one after the other. By design, CCD sensors support overlap capabilities also combined with trigger (see figure). In contrast, so-called pipelined CMOS sensors only support the overlapped mode. Even less CMOS sensors support the overlapped mode combined with trigger. Please check the sensor summary. In overlapping mode, the exposure starts the exposure time earlier during readout. Note In overlapped trigger mode, you have to keep in mind the following formula interval between two trigger events >= (readout time - exposure time)
Pixels	Picture element
PoE	Power over Ethernet. You can power the BVS CA-GX cameras over network cable (IEEE 802.3af (IEEE 802.3at Type 1) See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet). The IEEE specification allows the power to be injected onto the Cat 5E cable in a number of ways. We support power supplied over the data pins as shown in the "RJ45 table" in the chapter "Technical data". This alternative is most common.
PSE	Power sourcing equipment. The network PoE element that inserts power onto an Ethernet cable.
Pseudo colors	Display of gray scale images in false colors. A corresponding color is assigned to a specific gray scale value.
Resolution	Number of pixels (horizontal x vertical)
ROI/AOI	Region/Area of interest.
SFNC	Standard Feature Naming Convention of GenICam. See also The latest GenICam™ properties list can be found here: http://www.emva.org/standards-technology/genicam/genicam-downloads/ The file is called "GenICam™ Standard Features Naming Convention (PDF)"
Shell	In computing, a shell is a piece of software that provides an interface for users. Command-line shells provide a command-line interface (CLI) to the operating system. The primary purpose of the shell is to invoke or "launch" another program; however, shells frequently have additional capabilities such as viewing the contents of directories.
Square pixels	Square-shaped pixels (height-width ratio 1:1)
True color	24-bit true color; 16.7 million colors
USB3 Vision™	A closed source framework, defined and administered by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), for transmitting video and related control data over USB 3. Sometimes U3V is used as an acronym.
UDP	The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is an Internet protocol. It is used by applications to send messages to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
Vertical sync	Synchronization pulse in video signal for field end recognition.
Virtual Network Computing (VNC)	Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop sharing system that uses the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer. Over a network, it transmits the mouse and keyboard events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical screen updates back in the other direction. To access the camera's desktop from a PC via VNC, you have to know the IP address of the remote system. Start a VNC viewer and point it to the remote system. You won't need a password. Of course, you won't get a very fast live image display via the network with VNC but you should be able to start ImpactControlCenter and capture images.
wxWidgets	wxWidgets is a cross-platform GUI library. It can be used from languages such as C++, Python, Perl, and C#/.NET. See also http://www.wxwidgets.org
Zero signal	The zero signal was needed with the old frame grabbers, to calibrate the analog/digital converter (ADC) (signal and parameter aren't important anymore).