Abaco Systems has announced ImageFlex, the company’s new software tool designed to allow engineers to harness the full potential of NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs for applications such as real-time image processing and image visualization. The announcement was made at the 2017 Army Aviation Mission Solutions Summit in Nashville, Tennessee.
ImageFlex greatly simplifies application creation by delivering a powerful set of high-level application programming interfaces (APIs) that exploit the full capabilities of the underlying GPUs while abstracting the complex details associated with each implementation. Applications built using the ImageFlex framework are easier to develop, test, debug and maintain, while speeding up time to deployment by up to five times.
The ImageFlex framework API is a user-friendly interface that provides an abstraction layer on top of OpenGL to allow developers with no OpenGL experience to rapidly create high performance image processing and graphics applications. It includes optimized, high quality image fusion, stabilization and distortion correction algorithms, as well as a reference implementation of “Skybox”, an application that performs real-time 360° spherical stitching. The API facilitates full ‘spherical’ situational awareness by facilitating the use of ‘cube maps’ displaying equi-rectangular images. The reference implementation, along with a configuration utility, can enable users to integrate their own camera array and processing very quickly.
Typical applications for ImageFlex include Degraded Visual Environment (DVE), 360° situational awareness, helmet mounted sight processing, and target identification and tracking for manned and unmanned aircraft systems.
ImageFlex complements Abaco’s range of mission ready systems by enabling applications to be developed and deployed in even less time. It also complements Abaco’s extensive range of graphics hardware solutions based on GPU technology from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel, such as the FORCE2 and MAGIC1 rugged display computers as well as the soon-to-be-announced Project Elroy. Portable across operating systems, ImageFlex is potentially safety-certifiable.
“ImageFlex is yet another example of how Abaco is combining hardware and software to drive down our customers’ development cost while accelerating their time to deployment,” said Mrinal Iyengar, Vice President, Product Management at Abaco Systems. “Like our other powerful software tools in the AXIS suite, ImageFlex provides customers with added schedule and performance confidence. It also further demonstrates Abaco’s commitment to delivering to our customers not just hardware, but a complete solution development framework.”
ImageFlex features OpenCL and CUDA interoperability layers to simplify the problem of using the GPU for compute and display in harmony. It provides high quality implementations of GPU accelerated adaptive image fusion, lens distortion correction and image stabilization, all supported by a set of demos and reference examples oriented towards minimizing learning curves.
