Hi,
I'm in the process of writing a custom INDI client that will be able to control various CCDs (hopefully I'll get to the point where all INDI supported cameras are supported in the client).

I am having trouble finding fields that would allow me to determine whether a camera is a color (bayer matrix) or mono camera. Additionally, when the camera is a color camera, it would be really helpful to know the bayer x and y offsets. The reason I need this information is so that I can automatically debayer the raw image prior to processing the image through the rest of my code. If I have to I can hard code the bayer offsets for supported cameras, but I really would like to be able to automatically determine color or mono since the UI on this client will be very limited.

The debayering is performed at the driver level, not client. It is then stored as FITS and transmitted to the client, or it can be sent as native debayred frame.

How can I request the option to debayer in the driver then? Right now I am definitely getting raw frames back. Also, do you know if it does a 16 bit per channel debayer? A lot of algorithms are only for 8 bit images and that won't be sufficient for my purposes. I am using OpenCV for post processing of the captured images and it can do a 16 bit debayer.

Let's take a step back, what INDI drivers are you planning to use? Or are you going to develop new INDI drivers for your cameras? Let's start with the hardware first and we can go from there.

I'm not writing a driver, I'm writing a client. Right now I'm testing on an Atik 314e color camera and the result that I get back is a raw, bayered image. Ideally, I would like my client to be able to work with any camera that INDI supports.

I actually don't mind getting a raw image back since I already have routines to handle the debayer, the only parts that are missing are some way to tell that the data is a bayered image and a way to know the bayer offsets so that I know how the debayering algorithm should proceed. If the INDI driver internally does a 16 bit debayer though, then I could just use that.

Ok, I just ran a quick test switching off CCD_COMPRESSION.Raw and it looks to me like the INDI debayer is an 8-bit one. That's not going to work for my purposes, so I may just need to provide the user with the option to select color vs mono and specify bayer offsets either via user option or hardcoding for each camera type.

Peter developed the INDI Atik driver and I don't think he added debayer support yet. We are also missing debayer support in SBIG driver as well (16bit) since there is no hardware to test this specific camera model.

Oh, the quick test I did just then was with the simulator CCD driver since my Atik was unhooked at the moment. What I saw was that although the CCD simulator was set to 16 bit depth, it returned an image with only 8 bit depth after the debayer. It seems like I'm just going to have to support this through my own UI, it's just a shame that I can't get enough information about the user's camera to do it automatically. Thanks for the help though.

I've been working with the Starlight Xpress driver while developing an INDI client application and it also does not seem to be doing any debayering. Is the correct pattern to be doing the debayering in the driver rather than the client and this driver just doesn't have it yet? I only was able to locate debayering code in a couple drivers, mostly stuff in the QHY driver.

Yes there is no debayering now in the Starlight Xpress driver. I just recently implemented debayering in SBIG CCD driver, you can check it out and use the code there. Please make all your changes against the INDI SX driver in subversion and a patch would be appreciated if you get it working!

Is it a good idea to do debayering in CCD driver? I had similar issue with AstroImager and decided to do it in client and for preview only. For additional processing it is much better (or necessary) to have original mono FITS file anyway. Peter

The driver simply returns a 3D FITS Cube RGB.. even in KStars, there is no support for color FITS and I elect to show only one data set, but the driver should be responsible for sending the color FITS image.