topic Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU) in Machine Vision

ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrey_Dmitriev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:17:00 GMT

Colleagues,

Last weekend I have done (more or less) my "ADV Toolkit", and very happy to announce it. May be this toolkit will be useful for someone else...

For me this project is "just for fun", the toolkit itself is free (GPL).

In general "NPP" part of this toolkit is a high-level wrapper to NVPP Imageprocessing Library, so it enables usage of NVidia GPU resources for image processing directly from LabVIEW environment. Right now roughly 100 SubVIs inside. I tried to preserve "IMAQ Vision" ideology, so if you have experience with IMAQ Vision, then using of this toolkit should be also quite easy for you (sorry, no documentation provided at this moment, except few examples).

Requirements:

- NVidia CUDA-enabled videocard

- Latest NVidia driver with CUDA 3.0 support

- LabVIEW 2009

- Vision Acquisition Software or Vision Development Module 2009

- CVI Run-Time 2009

If your system meet the requirements above, then download ADV Toolkit 1.0.1 (12 MB)

How to install:

- Download and unzip archive (link above)

- Run Setup (be sure that LabVIEW 2009 is not running)

- Point installer to the directory where LabVIEW2009 installed (usually C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2009)

After install you should get "AD Vision Toolkit" in the palette menu.

Toollkit and all necessary DLLs will be installed then in <LabVIEW 2009>\user.lib\_ADVision.

Getting started:

At the first please open example "00.Check your GPU Card.vi" (should be located in <LabVIEW 2009>\examples\ADVision\NPP Examples), then run it.

If your GPU is supported, then you will see something like that:

After that you can open other examples and see how it works.

This toolkit equipped with "Bridge to IMAQ", so as result you can easily and transparently integrate your IMAQ code with GPU code, for example:

Toolkit was tested on NVidia Quadro NVS 290, Quadro FX 1700, GeForce 9200 and GeForce 9600 GT.

Speed of execution depends from the videocard, in some cases GeForce 9600GT faster than QuadCore Xeon.

Please save your job every time before start! (there are lot of bugs, mostly from me, partially from NVidia)

Feedbacks, bug reports, etc are highly appreciated to AndyDm@GMail.com

Thanks,

Andrey.

Message Edited by Andrey Dmitriev on 05-17-2010 06:51 PM

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

BlueCheese — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:17:23 GMT

Awesome job Andrey! I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but your toolkit looks very nicely done.

Out of curiosity, have you played around with the current offering NI has up on NI Labs for GPU computing (https://forums.ni.com/t5/GPU-Computing/LabVIEW-GPU-Computing/td-p/3499493)? I know the NI one one is not Vision-specific, but I was wondering if you had a chance to play with that and if you have any thoughts on what the shortcomings of it might be compared to yours.

Eric

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrey_Dmitriev — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:45:36 GMT

Thank you, Eric!

Yes of course, I have played with "LabVIEW GPU Computing" from NI Labs.

More exactly, I have used NICompute Framework in my toolkit as well (because all CUDA calls should be performed from the same context). Now all calls in my toolkit are thread-safe (thanks to MathGuy)

From functionality point of view both solutions quite different and can't be compared. As far as I can understand, NI Labs solution is "more generic" and "low level", and my solution is "high level" and closely specific to image processing (because this is my primary area of interest).

Also don't expect too much. This is just wrapper to NVPP.

My goal was to deliver really simple integration for CPU/GPU code. So, the best use case is to use this solution together with IMAQ for speeding up some "bottlenecks" if performance of IMAQ Vision is not enough for very basic operations such as arithmetic operators or basic filters. May be also useful for Video processing in realtime.

Functions which I got running so far:

Image Management, Pixel Manipulation, Files: Create, Dispose, Set, Convert, Copy, Get Info, GPU Image from/to IMAQ Image, GPU Image from/to LabVIEW Array, Load Image from File to GPU Memory

Image manipulation (Geometry Transforms): Mirror, Resize, Transpose

Filter Functions: FilterBox, Filter (Convolution), FilterRow, FilterColumn, FilterMax, FilterMin, SumWindowColumn, SumWindowRow, Filter Kernels

Analysis (Statistics Functions): Mean, StdDev, NormDiff, Sum, MinMax, HistogramEven

Operators: Add Sub, Mul, Div, AbsDiff, Compare

Processing: Threshold, LUT Linear

Image types: U8, U16, I16, SGL, RGB U32, RGB U64 (but mostly supported are U8 and RGB U32)

In my "ToDo" list: JPEG conversion and Affine Transforms.

Thanks,

Andrey.

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

muks — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:27:04 GMT

Great job andrey. I am gonna try this.

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

colman77 — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:51:56 GMT

Looks awesome. Anyone know if this works with Labview 2010?

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

DavidU — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:58:13 GMT

Andrey,

This looks great. I realise it may not be simple, but is it possible to get this in 8.6?

Thanks

Dave

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrey_Dmitriev — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:35:00 GMT

@DavidU wrote:

Andrey,

This looks great. I realize it may not be simple, but is it possible to get this in 8.6?

Thanks

Dave

Unfortunately its not so easy right now. I tried to make downconvert with version 1.1, but there are some small technical troubles with this action (mostly compatibility with old vision versions). So at this moment I decided to make support only for recent LabVIEW version (toolkit for LV2010 coming soon) without downward compatibility.

But if you have LabVIEW 8.6 + Vision (2009 or above) you can try this version: ADV-1_1_2(LV86).zip

If you have pure LabVIEW 8.6 without Vision installed, then you can try ADV-1_1_2(LV86)+.zip

If you have LabVIEW 8.6 with Vision 8.6, then you have no chance (and please do not try - you may need to reinstall Vision after this attempt).

Andrey.

Use attached software at your own risk.

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

DavidU — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:58:58 GMT

Thanks Andrey,

I'll try it and let you know.

Dave

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

jhien — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 21:14:59 GMT

Hello Andrey

Right what I tried to do actually. A really goog job, I begin to tried it on labview 2010, it look to work fine.

A question: it would mean that an application created with your library can be ditributed without the ni vision royalty.

but what about the "IMAQ image.ctl" used in your example. It is not possible to create a new one without doing a copy/past from your example? (from \vi.lib\vision\Image Controls.llb it doesn't work) Is it a probleme with license?

(As you understand, I haven't the ni vision dev module)

In fact I try to create also some wraper for openCV the goal is to decode 7segment LCD captured from a webcam

the application will be done in labview 8.5 (without ni vision developpement)

If possible I still continue to use the useful IMAQ image.ctl but I have probleme with the convertion between IMAQ pointer and openCV image structure pointer.

in your example the pointer is a void *src (handle by value) but in an older message (Re: Using OpenCV library in LabVIEW) you propose

int Convolution_OpenCV_NI (char* LVImagePtrSrc, int LVLineWidthSrc,
char* LVImagePtrDst, int LVLineWidthDst,
int LVWidth, int LVHeight)
but it need ni vision isn't it?

int Convolution_OpenCV (IMAQ_Image *ImageSrc, IMAQ_Image *ImageDst)
that need also the ni vision dll?

Is it possible to have the sources code of your dll? Is it possible to compile them without NI vision?

best regard

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrei_Hapenciuc — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:35:04 GMT

Hi Andrey,

I want to congratulate you for this great toolkit, is exactly what I needed.

I have just bought an GTS450 videocard to use it in my image processing projects.

I have checked the NVidia website for how many Processor Cores this videocard has, it says 192.

But when I try you're example it says number of streaming processors = 4 !!!

I am a bit upset since is lower than you’re 9800 videocard

There is any way I can use more of these Streaming Processors to have my computations done faster?

Please Help.

Best Regards

Andrei

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrey_Dmitriev — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:14:58 GMT

@rfdfdgf wrote:

I want to congratulate you for this great toolkit, is exactly what I needed.

I have just bought an GTS450 videocard to use it in my image processing projects.

I have checked the NVidia website for how many Processor Cores this videocard has, it says 192.

But when I try you're example it says number of streaming processors = 4 !!!

Hi, Andrej,

Its seems to be OK. You probably confused SMs (streaming multiprocessors) with SPs (shader processors or CUDA Cores). As far as I know, your GTS 450 based on GF 106 architecture and on this architecture each streaming multiprocessor contains 48 SPs. So, 192/48 = 4. SMs are really the basic execution unit in NVIDIA hardware.

Hope it helps for understanding,

Andrey.

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrei_Hapenciuc — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:36:13 GMT

Andrey I must confess you that I simply love a straight answer.

Thank you very much.

I hope the shop will accept the return in exchange of a Quadro FX380 video card 🙂

If you're kind how many SMs and SPs have the 9600 video card? Where can I find all this data about CUDA video cards?

Once again thank you for the great job.

Best Regards,

Andrei

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrey_Dmitriev — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 15:58:07 GMT

@rfdfdgf wrote:

Andrey I must confess you that I simply love a straight answer.

Thank you very much.

I hope the shop will accept the return in exchange of a Quadro FX380 video card 🙂

If you're kind how many SMs and SPs have the 9600 video card? Where can I find all this data about CUDA video cards?

Once again thank you for the great job.

On all cards other than Fermi, a streaming multiprocessor is a cluster of 8 scalar cores. Therefore I have 8 SMs (and totally 64 SPs). But from performance point of view GTS 450 should be much faster than 9600 GT (even with less SMs).

You can get tech specs from nvidia web site (search for each card), or from wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_400_Series

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Quadro

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_9_Series

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

Andrey.

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Shreyas — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 06:10:22 GMT

Hello everyone,

I am facing an issue when I am trying to build an executable with the toolkit on my LabVIEW 2010. It builds the executable successfully, but the only problem being when I run the exe. The VI runs perfectly fine with now warnings/ errors. But the exe throws out dll's missing errors namely freeimage.dll and advision.dll missing. I was able to find the feeimage.dll but unable to find the later one. Could someone help me out with this if there is a workaround for the same and if any one has encountered the same problem?

Thanking you in anticipation.

Regards,

Shreyas H

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

biophysics_bob — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:48:11 GMT

I got your code to work! Finally a simple way of using IMAQ with the GPU. If you could post the source code to your DLL files, that would help me a lot in my goal to start writing my own image processing filters.

Cheers,

Bob

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

viScience — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:29:06 GMT

Is it possible that this toolset could be extended to stream to video formats like avi? One of the great bottlenecks I have found

in IMAQ is the performance limitations of the AVI Write frame.

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

Andrey_Dmitriev — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:39:49 GMT

Yes, there als AVI functions based on OpenCV VideoWriter, which can be better in some cases.

You must know FourCC code for your codec.

For example, writing video with xvid codec looks like that:

(Some users reported that this code caused troubles on exit)

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

GriffinRU — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 22:47:10 GMT

Great Job,

How about missing AVI libraries? It is possible I might missing someting...

Looking forward to test it with high speed GigE cams.

-Artur

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

GriffinRU — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 03:02:42 GMT

AVI's library identified,

No more help required, thank you

-Artur

Re: ADV Toolkit (Imageprocessing on NVidia GPU)

peper2001 — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:33:13 GMT

Congratulation for this toolkit! This is exactly what I needed and it's, in my opinion, easier to use than the GPU analysis toolkit!

Any chance you've been updating it since 2010?

regards,