Over the past few years, embedded vision has evolved from a buzzword to a widely adopted technology used across industrial, medical, retail, entertainment, and farming sectors. With each phase of its evolution, embedded vision has ensured a significant growth in the number of camera interfaces available to choose from. However, despite the technological advancements, MIPI and USB interfaces have remained the two most popular types for a majority of embedded vision applications.
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The selection of a best-fit interface depends on many factors like frame rate/bandwidth requirements, resolution, data transfer reliability, cable length, complexity, and – of course – the overall cost. In this article, we look at both interfaces in detail to better understand their capabilities and limitations.
A MIPI camera is nothing but a camera module or system that uses a MIPI interface to transfer images from the camera to the host platform. In comparison, a USB camera uses a USB interface for data transfer. Now, let us understand the different types of MIPI and USB interfaces and where they are used.
MIPI is the most commonly used interface in today’s market for point-to-point image and video transmission between cameras and host devices. It can be attributed to MIPI’s ease of use and its ability to support a broad range of high-performance applications. It also comes equipped with powerful features such as p, 4K, 8K and beyond video and high-resolution imaging.
MIPI interface is an ideal choice for applications like head-mounted virtual reality devices, smart traffic applications, gesture recognition systems, drones, facial recognition, security, surveillance systems, etc.
Even though it is a powerful and popular interface, MIPI CSI does come with a few limitations. For instance, MIPI cameras rely on extra drivers to work. It means that there is limited support for different image sensors unless embedded system manufacturers really push for it!
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To learn more about MIPI cameras and how they work, have a look at What is a MIPI camera? How does MIPI camera work?
The USB interface tends to serve as the junction between two systems – the camera and the PC. Since it is well-known for its plug-and-play capabilities, choosing the USB interface implies that you can say goodbye to expensive, drawn-out development times and costs for your embedded vision interface. USB 2.0, the older version, has significant technical limitations. As the technology begins to dwindle, a number of its components become incompatible. USB 3.0 and the USB 3.1 Gen 1 interfaces were launched to overcome the limitations of the USB 2.0 Interface.
The biggest disadvantage of the USB 3.0 interface is that you cannot run high-resolution sensors at high speed. Another downfall is that you can only use a cable up to a distance of 5 meters from the host processor. While longer cables are available, they are all fitted with “boosters”. How well these cables work together with industrial cameras has to be checked for every individual case.
Now that we understand what each of the two interfaces is, let us do a feature by feature comparison of MIPI and USB in the below table:
GMSL is another popular interface which is used as an alternative to MIPI and USB, typically when the image data has to be transferred to a distance of more than 3 meters. To understand how a MIPI camera compares with GMSL camera, check out GMSL camera over MIPI camera.
To learn how to choose an interface for your embedded vision system, visit How to choose the right interface for an embedded vision system.
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