The Embedded Camera API Exploratory Group has been created in response to industry requests. Increasingly, the emerging field of embedded vision is resulting in camera sensors being tightly integrated with image, vision, and inferencing accelerators in self-contained systems.
A pressing industry question arises whether innovation and efficiency in the embedded vision market is becoming constrained by the lack of open cross-vendor camera control API standards to reduce development and integration costs of multiple advanced sensors and cameras. Such API standards could potentially enable control of a wide range of camera sensors, depth sensors, camera arrays and ISP hardware to generate sophisticated image streams for downstream local processing by diverse accelerators.
Background to Khronos and EMVA
The EMVA manages the GenICam standard for machine vision which is a widely used generic programming interface for industrial cameras that has become increasingly sophisticated as digital cameras integrate local processing capabilities. EMVA is also developing the emVision standard for embedded vision.
The Khronos Group is an open standards consortium that manages multiple API standards for vision, compute and inferencing acceleration such as OpenVX , OpenCL, SYCL, and Vulkan. Khronos has previously worked on the OpenKCAM API standard for camera control that was never publicly released. Elements of the OpenKCAM design may be re-used if they help meet the requirements in the agreed SOW.
