Keyence CV-5000 Family

The Keyence CV-5000 family of Machine Vision controllers use a dedicated listening port for TCP connections for image streaming. (Default 8501). The stream format isn't well documented but is a one-line ASCII header with metadata followed by the binary image content. The latter is configurable to be either JPEG format or Windows Bitmap format. The controller also offers scaling before transmission.

This driver maintains a connection to the specified port and accepts any images sent, parsing the metadata and automatically determining the image encoding. A connection to the controller's command port (default 8500) is also maintained in order to support scripted ad-hoc control. See the Scripting section for details.

Multiple cameras are supported, and their MJPEG streams obtained by including a /C1, /C2, /C3, or /C4 suffix on the full-scale URL. If the suffix is omitted, camera #1's stream will be delivered. The complete URL for quarter-scale on Camera #2 would look like:

http(s)://gateway:port/system/streamer/<device_name>/C2?quarter

This device type does not need OpenCV, but will run more efficiently if it is present. (OpenCV scaling and compression appear to be better optimized than the native Java BufferedImage and ImageIO implementations.)