In a future update to Syphon Framework, it might be possible to request a CIImage directly from the Syphon framework. There are some calls to create a Core Image from an existing IOSurface. No promises, but it might be useful in some cases, especially applications not using OpenGL, and leveraging only Core Image for their processing pipeline.
Let me discuss with bangnoise, see if it makes sense. There are lots of gotchas, so again, no promises.