The Euresys Picolo cards are top-quality video acquisition cards compatible with standard PAL or NTSC cameras. They are dedicated to high-end applications in the fields of video surveillance and security, or entry-level applications in the field of machine vision such as quality control and production monitoring. These cards faithfully digitize the video signal provided, offering perfect image fidelity to make the most of the data provided by a camera.

A fully digital technique is used to synchronize the digitizer operation on the incoming video signal. Before PCI transfer to the PC, the acquired images can be scaled to any format smaller than the original one, down to 1/12 (1/8 for the Picolo Alert). The downscaling process involves a sophisticated hardware device, performing an accurate interpolation in both the horizontal and vertical directions. The image buffer for a downscaled image is smaller in size, and its transfer needs less PCI bandwidth. Moreover, any part of the incoming image can be retained for further PCI transfer, allowing to define a region of interest.

Before storing the acquired image into the destination memory buffer, a pixel format conversion takes place in real-time. Numerous color or monochrome formats are available such as packed RGB32, RGB24, RGB16, RGB15, YCrCb 4:2:2, YCrCb 4:1:1, Y8 or such as planar YCrCb 4:2:2, YCrCb 4:1:1, YCrCb 4:2:0, YCrCb 4:1:0, YCbCr 4:2:0, YCbCr 4:1:0.

All Euresys cards are PCI bus mastering agents that directly store the acquired images into the PC physical memory without CPU involvement. As a unique feature, the Euresys capture cards automatically recover the scatter-gather virtual memory mapping to present the data as a regular bitmap image in a user allocated memory buffer.