Acquire & Record

The acquisition workflow: start the camera, frame the region of interest, tune processing while watching the preview and monitoring charts, then record an experiment to HDF5.

Start the camera

Click Start Camera (main tab-bar corner). Frames start streaming from the connected camera (or the mock folder) and the status-bar statistics come alive. Stop Camera halts acquisition; statistics reset to zero.

Overview tab — frame the ROI

• Shows the raw live stream (display rate capped independently of the camera rate, so a fast camera does not overload the UI).
• The semi-transparent red rectangle is the region of interest (ROI): drag it to reposition. The ROI feeds processing and recording directly, and the current geometry is echoed in the status bar (ROI: w x h @ (x, y)).
• Advanced: the tab hosts the camera-side GenICam script editor. Apply to Camera stops capture while the script is applied — restart the camera afterwards.

Experiment ▸ Preview — tune processing

• The canvas shows the processed view. Overlay modes: Off / Mask / Contours / Both. While following live, cell colors mean blue = target group, green = valid, red = invalid.
• Playback controls under the canvas let you pause and scrub the recent frame buffer; save buffer to disk exports it as a single uncompressed AVI (ImageJ/Fiji-compatible) or a folder of TIFFs, never overwriting existing output.
• A background frame is captured automatically (or set manually from the playback panel); the current background shows in the sidebar preview.
• The docked Config / Profiles editor (right) edits the processing configuration — thresholds, gates, multi-image, target group — and manages named profiles, including catalog-published ones. Changes saved to the config file apply live; no restart needed. Note that several gates only take effect when their enable_* flag is on.

Experiment ▸ Monitoring — watch the numbers

• Live histograms (area, deformability, brightness) and scatter plots (e.g. deformability vs. area) over the most recent frames, with scroll-to-zoom.
• Live totals: valid count, invalid count, algorithm FPS, valid FPS.
• Charts accumulate only while the tab is visible, and they are a live preview — they are not saved with the experiment.
• The top row also carries trigger bring-up controls (single and periodic test pulses) for commissioning a sorter.

Settings dialogs

Settings ▸ Processing Settings — the full processing configuration form: blur/threshold, validity gates, ring-ratio and target-group gating, multi-image capture.

Settings ▸ Monitoring Settings — chart bin counts, axis ranges, and refresh rate for the Monitoring page.

Settings ▸ Pixel-to-Micron — the pixel→micrometre conversion factor (default 0.4886 µm/px) used for area and derived metrics.

Record an experiment

1. Make sure the camera is running — otherwise you'll see "Camera must be running before starting an experiment."
2. Click Start Experiment (Experiment tab-bar corner). A Save dialog asks where to write the HDF5 file (.h5 is appended if you omit it). The corner indicator turns green and the flushed-frame counter starts.
3. Click Stop Experiment when done. The final flush runs in the background and the file is closed with its metadata (ROI, background, configuration) — wait for the indicator to return to grey before pulling a USB drive.

Recorded files contain the valid/invalid frame images, masks, per-frame metrics, and the experiment metadata needed to reanalyse later — see Review & post-process.

Status bar statistics

Field	Meaning
Display	Frames per second actually rendered in the preview
Algo	Realtime processing rate (frames/s)
Valid / Invalid	Classification rates per second
Flushed(valid)	Total valid frames written to HDF5 in the active experiment
Camera	Transport statistics from the camera (frame rate, MB/s)
Ring width	Median ring ratio of validated frames (drives autofocus)

Rates reset to zero when an experiment starts or capture stops; totals persist until the next experiment starts.