Open Image Debugger: Enabling visualization of in-memory buffers on GDB/LLDB

Open Image Debugger is a tool for visualizing in-memory buffers during debug sessions, compatible with both GDB and LLDB. It works out of the box with instances of the OpenCV Mat class and Eigen matrices, but can also be customized to work with any arbitrary data structure.

Prefer VS Code or a fork (Cursor, VSCodium, Windsurf, …)? Skip the manual build — install the extension from the VS Code Marketplace or Open VSX. See Installation below.

New — using CLion or Android Studio? The Open Image Debugger plugin is now on the JetBrains Marketplace: plot buffers straight from the native C/C++ debugger, inside the IDE. See Installation below.

New — declarative custom types. You can now describe your own buffer types in a .oid/types.json file instead of writing Python; the same file works in gdb, lldb, and the VS Code and JetBrains extensions. See doc/declarative-types.md.

Download (experimental)

A bit experimental, better to compile manually

Features

• GUI interactivity:
  • Scroll to zoom, left click+drag to move the buffer around;
  • Rotate buffers 90° clockwise or counterclockwise;
  • Go-to widget that quickly takes you to any arbitrary pixel location;
• Buffer values: Zoom in close enough to inspect the numerical contents of any pixel.
• Auto update: Whenever a breakpoint is hit, the buffer view is automatically updated.
• Auto contrast: The entire range of values present in the buffer can be automatically mapped to the visualization range [0, 1], where 0 represents black and 1 represents white.
• The contrast range can be manually adjusted, which is useful for inspecting buffers with extreme values (e.g. infinity, nan and other outliers).
• Link views together, moving all watched buffers simultaneously when any single buffer is moved on the screen
• Supported buffer types: uint8_t, int16_t, uint16_t, int32_t, uint32_t, float and double
• Supported buffer channels: Up to four channels (Grayscale, two-channels, RGB and RGBA)
• GPU accelerated
• Supports large buffers whose dimensions exceed GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE.
• Supports data structures that map to a ROI of a larger buffer.
• Exports buffers as png images (with auto contrast) or octave/matlab matrix files (unprocessed).
• Auto-load buffers being visualized in the previous debug session
• Designed to scale well for HighDPI displays
• Works on Linux, macOS X and Windows (experimental)

Supported OSes