CIViQ6 - Camera Integration for Vimba and Qt6

CIViQ6 is a Python package which integrates VimbaPython and Qt6 multimedia scheme.

It provides:

• Class to instantiate the Vimba instance in QThread
• Camera API similar to that of QtMultimedia
• Compatibility with QVideoSink and QVideoWidget

The following Qt bindings are supported:

• PySide6
• PyQt6

This package is tested using Vimba 6.0, VimbaPython 1.2.1, and Mako U-130B camera device connected to the device with Window 11.

How to use

CIViQ6 imitates QtMultimedia scheme to provide API for the Allied Vision camera device.

Running the Vimba instance

VimbaRunner is a runner which wraps the VimbaPython API and starts Vimba.

To start the Vimba instance, move VimbaRunner to a dedicated QThread and run it. This task must be done before any other Vimba-related operation.

Streaming the camera

Once the Vimba instance is started, user can construct VimbaCamera instance, set it to VimbaCaptureSession, and run it just as one would do with QCamera and QMediaCaptureSession.

Set QVideoWidget or QVideoSink (or any other QObject-based preview) to the capture session to stream the camera.

Setting the camera properties

VimbaCamera provides methods which return VimbaPython's Feature objects that can get and set the camera properties.

Capturing and recording

Unlike Qt6, CIViQ6 does not have default classes that support image capturing and video recording from VimbaCaptureSession. User must define own classes that write VimbaPython's Frame object to file.

The documentaion provides examples for defining the image capturer and video recorder.

Examples

Use cases are provided in examples directory. They can be found in documentation as well.

Installation

Before you install, be careful for other Qt-dependent packages installed in your environment. For example, non-headless OpenCV-Python modifies the Qt dependency thus can make other Qt bindings unavailable.

To install CIViQ6, you first need to install VimbaPython package which is not distributed by PyPI. Go to its repository and follow the instructions.

After VimbaPython is installed, civiq6 can be installed using pip.

$ pip install civiq6

Documentation

CIViQ6 is documented with Sphinx. Documentation can be found on Read the Docs:

https://civiq6.readthedocs.io/

If you want to build the document yourself, clone the source code and install with [doc] option. This option installs the additional packages to build the document and to run the examples.

Go to doc directory and build the document.

$ pip install civiq6[doc]
$ cd doc
$ make html

Document will be generated in build/html directory. Open index.html to see the central page.