Firstsight Vision offers a new image processing capability through the Common Vision Blox (CVB) hardware-independent imaging toolkit from Stemmer Imaging. The latest version
of CVB makes use of the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) processor on the PC graphics card. Since this is the fastest available processor in the system and is optimised for imaging algorithms, using the GPU in this way can boost speed for some image processing functions up to a factor of 10. Graphic processors outperform other imaging acceleration methods including the fastest available FPGAs. Even allowing for delays in data transfer between the main memory and the GPU, a rise in performance by a factor of between 2 to 10 is possible when using a GPU in place of a CPU, with the added benefit that the CPU can then be used for other tasks simultaneously.