Balluff - BVS CA-GX0 / BVS CA-GX2 Technical Documentation
Working with binning / decimation

With binning / decimation it is possible to combine / reduce adjacent pixels vertically and/or horizontally. Depending on the sensor, up to 16 adjacent pixels can be combined / reduced.

See also
https://assets.balluff.com/documents/DRF_957352_AA_000/Binning_modes.png

To optimize the sensor speed, the firmware will check if the binning / decimation functionality is provided by the sensor. If it is available it will use the sensor for binning / decimation, if not, binning / decimation will be processed in the camera's FPGA.

If a binning / decimation combination is not possible, the following note will be displayed:

In this case no acquired images will be displayed until you have changed the settings.

Binning

Possible binning modes are:

  • Sum: The response from the combined pixels will be added, resulting in increased sensitivity.
  • Average: The response from the combined pixels will be averaged, resulting in increased signal/noise ratio.

Binning can be used to lighten the image at the expense of the resolution. This is a neat solution for applications with low light and low noise.

The following results were achieved with the BVS CA-SF2-0124ZG / mvBlueFOX3-2124G:

Exposure [in us] Binning Gain [in dB] Averager
2500 - 0 -
Exposure [in us] Binning Gain [in dB] Averager
2500 - 30 -
Exposure [in us] Binning Gain [in dB] Averager
2500 2H 2V 30 -
Exposure [in us] Binning Gain [in dB] Averager
2500 2H 2V 30 Averaging using 24 frames

The last image shows, that you can reduce the noise, caused by the increased gain, using frame averaging.

Decimation

Possible decimation modes are:

  • Discard: The value of every Nth pixel is kept, others are discarded.
  • Average: The value of a group of N adjacent pixels are averaged.