Fast VCR software for XIMEA cameras

XIMEA company is a well-known camera manufacturer with great achievements. The company offers super compact and high quality products with various resolutions, frame rates, bandwidths, interfaces, spectral sensitivities, image sensors, and hardware platforms. XIMEA cameras could be supplied with PCI-Express interface which significantly improves the bandwidth and enables reatime applications for high resolution and high fps cameras.

You can test any XIMEA camera with their CamTool software, but it's intended just for testing or for low fps solutions. To overcome that limitation we've developed a GPU-based software to work with XIMEA cameras to allow maximum performance and the highest image quality at realtime. You can download that software from that site and test it with available XIMEA cameras (8/10/12-bit monochrome or bayer).

XIMEA cameras

XIMEA PCIe cameras: high performance xiB-64 series
XIMEA USB3 cameras of xiC series
XIMEA USB3 cameras of xiQ series
Embedded vision and multi-camera xiX series

xiC and xiX camera series

The xiC is an extremely diversified and highly modular camera family designed for the Sony Pregius™ image sensor series. It offers multiple choices of combining sensors and interfaces. Even though it is a board stack, for system integrators it has all the benefits of a single board design and is incredibly small.

The xiX cameras are based on the same board-level concept and can stream images to the host computer via 2 lanes on a PCI Express Gen2 bus. Together with minimal latencies and CPU load, the cameras are a perfect fit for embedded vision and multi-camera applications. Thanks to flat flex cabling, the board-level and semi-housed variants allow integration in tight spaces and close proximity between cameras.

Fast VCR software for XIMEA camera control

Camera initialization (camera model, resolution, fps, etc.)
Input bit depth
Image resolution and ROI (region of interest)
FPS and exposure time
Gain
Camera bandwidth control
Optional modes: binning, decimation, dual gain, dual adc, etc.

Fast VCR: image processing pipeline for XIMEA cameras on GPU

Image acquisition
Dark frame subtraction (FPN)
Flat-Field Correction (Shading Correction)
Bad pixel removal
White Balance / AWB
Adaptive Exposure and Gain control - optional
Exposure correction (brightness control)
High quality demosaicing with MG algorithm
Color Correction with matrix profile or DCP profile
Wavelet-based denoising
Crop
Rotation (90/180/270 degrees) and flip/flop
Resize (downscale and upscale)
Sharpening
Gamma transform
JPEG compression and storage to SSD
Realtime output to monitor

Fast VCR software outputs

Output to monitor via OpenGL in real time
Encoding to JPEG and store images to SSD
Video encoding to MJPEG, H.264/H.265 and storage to a container on SSD
Low-latency video streaming
Optional real-time RAW/RGB/YCbCr data storage to SSD (compressed or uncompressed)
Interoperability with GPU-based neural network applications

Optional image processing modules on GPU

RAW frames capture, preview and storage to SSD
Histograms for raw and processed data
Curves and levels for RGB and HSV
DCP support
3D LUT support
Geometric and affine transforms
Chromatic aberration suppression at RAW domain
Undistortion via fast remap
LCP support
HDR support
SDI output support
Multiple camera support
Synchronized viewer for multiple camera system
JPEG2000 and Raw-JPEG codecs
Automatic realtime partitioning of AVI video file to specify file sizes
Interoperability with FFmpeg
Scripting via python
Much more...

All the above features are designed on the basis of our CUDA image processing SDK. Now our customers have an opportunity to utilize GPU-accelerated software components in their applications as a part of video processing pipeline. Here you can find other benchmarks for our SDK.

GPU Camera Sample Project on Github

We've released a gpu-camera-sample project on GitHub which is intended for building your own application with the Fastvideo SDK. This is open source software project for Windows/Linux/ARM to create camera application with GPU-based image processing. That application can capture raw images from machine vision cameras and process them on NVIDIA GPU very fast. You can download both source codes or binaries for evaluation. The software could also work with raw images in PGM format, which is very valuable to test image quality and processing time even if you don't have a camera.

Software downloads

XIMEA SDK for Windows/Linux/ARM
FastVCR software for XIMEA on Windows
FastVCR software for XIMEA on Linux Ubuntu 18.04
FastVCR software for XIMEA on ARM (Jetson Pack 5.6)