Unable to get colored image from AR0234 with Camarray HAT using BA10 format

Nvidia Jetson Cameras
1

Hi everyone, I’m working with an Arducam AR0234 camera connected via the Camarray HAT (dual setup) on a Jetson platform. I’m trying to get colored images out of it but I’m running into issues.

When I query the available video formats, I see two options:

  • Y16
  • BA10

I figured BA10 (Bayer 10-bit) is the one I need for color, so I wrote some capture code using that format. But the output I’m getting is completely garbled — not a proper image at all.

Has anyone gotten color output from this combination? Is BA10 the right format to use, or am I missing something?

2

Thanks for reaching out. Can you share a bit more detail about what you’re seeing?

  • Could you post the exact output of v4l2-ctl --list-formats or v4l2-ctl --get-fmt-video?
  • Can you share the code you’re using to capture the frames?
  • And a screenshot of the output you’re getting?

That’ll help narrow things down.

3

Sure, here’s the code I’m using to capture in BA10 format:

image.png

And this is what I get as output:

image.png

As you can see, it’s not a proper colored image at all. I was expecting BA10 to give me something I could work with, but this doesn’t look right.

4

Thanks for posting those — that’s really helpful.

Here’s what’s going on: the BA10 format does indeed output raw Bayer-pattern data from the sensor. But the issue is that on Jetson platforms, there is no ISP (Image Signal Processor) functionality available for this Camarray HAT Kit combination.

What that means in practice:

  • The raw Bayer data coming from BA10 needs to go through an ISP pipeline — demosaicing (debayering), white balance, color correction, gamma, etc. — before it becomes a viewable color image.
  • Jetson’s ISP doesn’t support this particular camera + HAT setup, so there’s no hardware path to process that raw stream into RGB.

Unfortunately, there isn’t currently a software or programmatic workaround for this on Jetson. The raw Bayer data is there under the hood, but without the ISP in the loop, there’s no way to get a proper color image out of it.

5

That’s disappointing to hear. Just to clarify — is it possible to convert the raw Bayer output to a colored image programmatically on the Jetson side? Like, could I write some debayering code myself in OpenCV or something similar to process that BA10 buffer into a usable RGB image?

6

That’s a fair question, and I did double-check this internally. Unfortunately, even a purely software-based debayering approach isn’t viable here.

The limitation isn’t just about the debayering algorithm itself — it’s more fundamental than that. The Jetson platform simply lacks the ISP pipeline support for this Camarray HAT Kit, and there’s no software stack available to bridge that gap. Even if you wrote custom debayering code, you’d still be missing the rest of the ISP processing chain (things like color correction matrices, black level calibration, lens shading correction, etc.) that are needed to turn raw sensor data into a proper color image. You’d likely end up with something that still doesn’t look right.

That said, we are aware of this gap and Arducam is planning to release an AR0234 camera HAT Kit with a built-in ISP board. That hardware will handle the full processing pipeline and output proper color images on Jetson. I don’t have a release date to share just yet, but I’ll make sure you get updated when it’s available.

For now, I know this isn’t the answer you were hoping for, but the only path forward for color output with this setup is to wait for the ISP-enabled hardware kit. Let me know if you have any other questions.