The head of image acquisition device is camera interface ,industrial camera is divided into analog video and digital video .
1:Analog :Traditional analog (With capture card)
2:Digital interface
3:Traditional digital video.

Analog interface
Analog video is including the standard and non-standard analog video .
There are a lot of analog image capture cards in the market at present , this captures are used to video display and video switch and some of them are used to machine vision processing.

Digital interface
1:RS-422/LVDS
RS-422 and LVDS are Low Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS).
The principle of LVDS is transmit signals with two wires at the same time and the voltage of two wires are opposite which is through the intensity difference of two wires to get the final data on the receiving end.
The noise from the signal is appeared in this two wires at the same time ,removing the signal noise and the signal information is not affected after subtracting .Signal noise immunity is improved and the voltage is decreased,so the signal transmission distance is to be improved,Rs-422MAX transmission distance is up to 1200m. LVDS is the basis of the Channel Lin and Camera Link interface .

2:Channel link interface
Channel Link is based on a LVDS standard which just serialize the parallel data and reduce the number of transmission cables. The total data of transfer rate of Channel Link is up to 1.8Gbps, which is used in the field of digital communication in earlier.

3:Camera Link interface
Camera Link is devolved from Channel Link technology ,which add some transmission control signal on the basis of Channel Link and defined some related transmission standards.Any products mark with “Camera Link” can be more convenient to connect. Camera Link interface standard is solve the problem of high-speed transmission which is formulated, amended and published by the American Society of Industrial Automation AIA .

4:IEEE1394 interface
1394 interface , it is also called “Fire Wire”,which was the first developed by the United States for computer network interconnection interface and they will used to connected the digital products、 computers and other machines.
IEEE1394 bus is the fastest high-speed serial bus so far ,1394a is the highest speed which up to 400Mbps and 1394b is 800Mbps . IEEE1394 is supported plug and play , WIN98 SE、WIN2000、WIN ME、WIN XP all of these operating systems are supported IEEE1394 without install driver at present.

5:USB interface
USB full name is Universal Serial Bus,it is formulated by CPQ、IBM、Microsoft and other companies at the end of 1994,but it is widely to be used until 1999.
USB interface is 4 "bit", the 2 root for the power cord and the other 2 for the signal lines.USB is serial interface can be hot plug which is easy to connect.The numbers of USB-connected peripherals are up to 127 and the total six layers ,which is started from the main unit and through a five-tier hub to be daisy-chained, you don’t worry about the number of connection device are limited ;The longest distance of communication is 5M between the two peripheral.USB1.1 interface are supports both synchronous and asynchronous data transfer,which rate is up to 12Mbps and 100 times faster than the standard of Serial ports and tenfold faster than parallel port; USB 2.0 downward compatibility USB1.1 、USB1.0 which data of transfer rate will up to 120Mbps~480Mbps.

6:Gigabit Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet technology as the newest high-speed Ethernet technology ,provide all the customers with effective solution to improve the efficiency of the core network ,which solution inherit the traditional Ethernet technology inexpensive features is the biggest advantage

7:GigE Vision
GigE Vision TM is formulated by Automated Imaging Association which image transmission standard is based on Gigabit Ethernet .The advantages are long transmission distance (up to 100 meters), high transmission efficiency and up to 10 Gigabit network, communication is convenient control , software and hardware are compatibility, high reliability, etc. It is the main area of future digital interface standard image which is bound to be more and more businesses are using.

From the versatility and universality the products are mostly use the industrial cameras of USB and Gige Vision interface at present. Except for these two interfaces,the industrial cameras of VGA interface are hot sell.