The actual physical arrangement of the red, green and blue "pixels" for a given camera is determined by the arrangement of the color filter arrays on the imaging sensor itself. The format (i.e. order) in which this raw color data is sent out, however, depends on the specific camera model and firmware version. This format can be queried using the BAYER_TILE_MAPPING register 0x1040 that is implemented on all PGR cameras. For more information on this register, consult the Point Grey Digital Camera Register Reference that is available on our downloads site.

Raw image data can be accessed programmatically via the pData pointer in the FlyCaptureImage structure (e.g. FlyCaptureImage.pData). In 8-bit-per-pixel modes, the first byte represents the pixel at (row 0, column 0), the second byte at (row 0, column 1), etc.

In the case of a 640x480 color Dragonfly (DRAG-COL) sending out Y8 image data in RGGB format, if we access the image data via the pData pointer we have the following:

• pData[0] = Row 0, Column 0 = red pixel (R)
• pData[1] = Row 0, Column 1 = green pixel (G)
• pData[640] = Row 1, Column 0 = green pixel (G)
• pData[641] = Row 1, Column 1 = blue pixel (B)