XIMEA CamTool plugin for Image Processing on GPU

Updated: August 27, 2026

Fastvideo's plugin for XIMEA CamTool adds CUDA-accelerated, real-time image processing to XIMEA cameras, running a full GPU ISP inside the camera vendor's own application. It keeps up with high-data-rate models, including 65 MPix cameras, so live capture stays real-time without leaving CamTool.

How these numbers were measured. Fastvideo benchmarks are measured on NVIDIA GPUs, timing pure GPU processing at the resolution, bit depth, format and quality stated on this page. See the full benchmark methodology and test environment and the Fastvideo SDK benchmark report (PDF). Our tools are open source on GitHub and built on NVIDIA CUDA.

Check a single module. Every module in the Fastvideo SDK comes with a command-line sample. Run it on your own images on your own GPU and compare the result with the figures published here.

Check the whole pipeline. A module in the middle of a pipeline cannot be judged on its own: its input is hard to prepare, and its output is an intermediate product you cannot look at. What matters is how it changes the final image and the total time of the schema. Two of our applications run the complete pipeline and report the time of every stage — FastVCR (live cameras or RAW files from disk, so no camera is required) and Fast CinemaDNG (DNG, offline). The benchmark module is included in the free builds of both.

Detailed benchmark data. Measured results are published on our benchmark pages: all benchmarks.

Prefer the standalone application or a specific interface? Use the FastVCR application for XIMEA, or see the xiB PCIe cameras and xiQ USB3 cameras. This page is the GPU plugin for XIMEA CamTool.

We wrote these algorithms ourselves

Image processing has always been a trade-off between quality and speed. The methods that give a good result take minutes per frame; the fast ones leave halos and artifacts. The reason is the compute budget: on a CPU there was never enough of it, so algorithms were simplified — and much of the industry still runs on simplifications accepted decades ago.

Fastvideo’s codecs and ISP modules are neither ports of that legacy nor wrappers around third-party code. We designed — and in many cases invented — the algorithms behind our demosaicing, denoising, tone mapping and JPEG/JPEG2000 codecs, and wrote them for CUDA from the start, on top of image-processing expertise built since 2009. An algorithm moved to the GPU still carries the compromises it was simplified for; ours were never made under that constraint. On a modern GPU the budget is large enough that, for practical workloads, the choice between quality and speed no longer has to be made.

That is why you get a complete, tuned imaging solution rather than a bag of GPU primitives — and why, when your pipeline needs something specific, we can change the algorithm itself, not just call it.

Pipeline for XIMEA CamTool plugin on GPU

What does the XIMEA CamTool GPU plugin do?

Dark frame subtraction (FPN)
Flat-Field Correction (Shading Correction)
Bad pixel removal
Automatic gain/exposure control
White Balance
High quality demosaicing with MG algorithm
Expo-correction (brightness control)
Highlight recovery
Bilateral and NLM denoising
Color Correction with matrix profile
8/10/12/14/16-bit LUTs (composite or per-color component) for tone mapping
Color Transforms: RGB->YCbCr->RGB, RGB->HSL->RGB, etc.
Histograms for raw and processed data
Crop
Rotation (90/180/270 degrees) and flip/flop
Resize (downscale and upscale)
DCP and LCP support
3D LUT transforms
Sharpening
Optional remap, perspective transform, rotation to arbitrary angle
Undistortion
3D LUT
Gamma transform (composite or per-color component)
JPEG / JPEG2000 / H.264 / H.265 compression
Video streaming
Real-time output to monitor

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

FastVCR software for XIMEA cameras

We've developed a high performance FastVCR software for USB3 and PCIe XIMEA cameras with image processing on CUDA. That software can offer real-time performance even for high data rate cameras like 65MPix/10-bit/70fps CB654, which includes data acquisition, raw image processing, color correction, output image/video encoding and streaming. It could be also used for multicamera systems. We recommend that solution instead of CamTool plugin.

GPU Camera Sample Project on Github

Apart from XIMEA CamTool plugin on GPU, there is gpu-camera-sample project for XIMEA cameras on Github. This is open source software for Windows/Linux/ARM to create camera application with GPU-based image processing. That application can capture raw images from XIMEA cameras and process them on NVIDIA GPU really 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 images if you don't have a camera.

About the author

Fyodor Serzhenko, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Fastvideo. He earned his PhD at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1993. Since 2009 he has led the development of Fastvideo’s GPU-accelerated image codecs and ISP modules, including the Fastvideo SDK. Connect on LinkedIn.

Why you can trust these results

Fastvideo has built GPU-accelerated image processing software since 2009. Our codecs comply with the standards they implement — JPEG (ITU-T T.81 / ISO IEC 10918) and JPEG2000 (ITU-T T.800 / ISO IEC 15444) — and our tools are open source on GitHub. Every performance figure we publish is reproducible: see our benchmark methodology, download the Fastvideo SDK benchmark report (PDF), and measure it on your own GPU.