Image processing for AI applications.

Release 2.0 of Abaco Systems' powerful, flexible ImageFlex image processing and visualization toolkit has been released. Leveraging the enormous power of GPU technology, ImageFlex provides an easy-to-use API framework to considerably speed and simplify the development, optimization and maintenance of advanced AI applications – especially those targeted at autonomous vehicles.

ImageFlex enables developers of image/video processing and visualization applications on GPUs to be substantially more productive by hiding the complexity of the underlying software layers, while maintaining high performance. By providing an OpenGL® abstraction layer (no OpenGL experience is required) it can reduce the number of lines of code required by a factor of five, radically reducing the effort and time needed in order to create, test and maintain the application. This means faster time-to-market as well as lower development cost.

New features for ImageFlex Release 2.0 include:

• Tools and reference examples enabling AI-based applications to be deployed on Abaco’s NVIDIA®-based GPU products.
• Provision of a reference target tracking example - a core building block for tracking applications.
• High quality, GPU-optimized image stabilization.

ImageFlex is highly complementary to Abaco’s NVIDIA GPU-based GVC1000 and GVC2000 hardware platforms, which use the NVIDIA Jetson supercomputer on a module for AI computing at the edge. This allows the creation of complete solutions for Degraded Visual Environment (DVE), 360° situational awareness, helmet mount sight processing, target identification and tracking and other EO/IR processing applications. It is portable across a range of graphics processing architectures and operating systems, and is potentially safety certifiable.

“ImageFlex significantly reduces our customers’ software engineering effort in the development and deployment of applications for EO/IR platforms and autonomy, and is unique in its ability to do so,” said John Muller, Chief Growth Officer at Abaco Systems. “Combined with our powerful, flexible hardware platforms, ImageFlex is evidence not only of our experience and expertise in AI-based graphics, video and visualization applications, but also of our commitment to providing our customers with more complete solutions.”

The ImageFlex API provides functions for a range of image processing operations from simple image transformations through to more complex lens distortion correction and image morphing. It includes optimized, high quality image fusion, stabilization, tracking and distortion correction algorithms, as well as a comprehensive set of reference application examples that provide core software building blocks. ImageFlex also provides tools and reference examples demonstrating how to integrate with sensors and deploy artificial intelligence-based applications such as object detection and recognition.
In addition, ImageFlex provides an innovative, high performance image fusion function that can fuse image data from multiple sources of different resolutions. The algorithm adaptively adjusts to pull through the regions of highest contrast in each source to a produce a fused result, enabling an observer or processing stage to act on the combined information of the sources.

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