FastVCR software on GPU for Hikrobot camerasHikRobot is a global product and solution provider specializing in machine vision and mobile robots. The machine vision products are widely used in industrial automation sectors such as consumer electronics, semiconductors and logistics, as a part of the vision applications like positioning guidance, measurement, quality inspection, code reading, OCR, etc. They help users to greatly improve productivity, accuracy and stability. 
You can test any Hikrobot camera with their original MVS software, but it's not intended for high fps applications. To overcome that limitation we've developed a GPU-based software to work with Hikrobot cameras to allow maximum performance and the highest image quality at realtime. You can download demo software from that link and test it with available RAW/PGM frames from Hikrobot cameras (8/10/12-bit raw monochrome or bayer). Why do we need high performance software for Hikrobot cameras?If we have a look at the latest SONY Pregius image sensors of the 4th generation, most of them have "high speed" version which means that these image sensors have not only high resolution, but also high frame rate, which is doubled in comparison with the second generation on SONY image sensors. Hikrobot cameras with these image sensors are supplied with high speed USB3 or GigE interfaces, so they have capabilities to capture acquired frames at the maximum bandwidth. That's true not only for SONY image sensors, the situation is the same with Gpixel and AMS (CMOSIS) as well. Modern machine vision cameras offer both high resolution and high fps, so it's quite a complicated task to perform real time processing with high quality and without dropped frames. That is exactly what we can do with FastVCR software which is running on NVIDIA GPU (mobile/laptop/desktop/server). In our pipeline we've included high quality demosaicing together with other image processing modules to take into account color science and high performance requirements. Machine vision cameras capture high quality images at realtime, so they are utilized in industrial and medical applications, streaming and broadcasting, digital cinema, 3D, AR and VR. FastVCR software for Hikrobot camera control
FastVCR software: image processing pipeline on GPU
FastVCR software outputs
FastVCR performance benchmarksThat software was built with the idea of GPU image processing to be capable of working in high performance camera applications. This is exactly what Hikrobot is offering for their products with USB3 and GigE interfaces. The software can work with multicamera systems to process raw frames from all cameras in real time without frame drops. Still, the maximum performance could be achieved with the fastest 10-GigE cameras due to their bandwidth. In general, the performance depends on the complexity of image processing pipeline and utilized hardware (CPU/GPU/SSD, etc). You can download the demo software from the link below to test your Hikrobot camera and to evaluate image quality, latency and performance. That software can work at camera emulator mode to check image processing performance on GPU without having a camera connected to a PC. User can load arbitrary RAW image in RAW/PGM/TIFF format to work with. This is very useful to check time measurements which are available for each image processing module on GPU. Optional image processing modules on GPU
FastVCR command-line applicationQuite often we need to run a software without any GUI, and it could happen in different situations. This is the case for drone applications or for any other task with remote camera control. This is also the case for any long-term unsupervised video recording and streaming. To meet these requirements, we've developed a CLI application which has all the above features of FastVCR software and it could work without GUI. We are still able to have full control on image sensor and image processing parameters at real time. For video preview we supply our own player with RTSP client or one can use VLC instead. The software is compatible with Windows/Linux/L4T and all image processing is done on the GPU. Why could we need FastVCR software instead of MVS?Here we point out the most important features which are essential for camera applications. 1. Fast RAW image processing on the GPU 2. Fast RGB encoding 3. Testing 4. Denoising 5. Low latency solution 6. CLI application 7. Realtime historgam, parade, vectorscope monitor. 8. Detailed statistics about camera operation at realtime. 
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. Apart from FastVCR software, we are offering custom software design to build a solution according to customers' requirements. We can implement application-specific modes of operation to solve the task you need. Please fill the contact form below with your project info and send it to us. Compatibility
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FastVCR roadmap
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