Khronos Establishing A Camera API Working Group

In recent years The Khronos Group has been expanding a lot and forming a number of new open industry standards around 3D commerce, analytics rendering, and more. The latest is Khronos now establishing a Camera API working group.

The Khronos Camera API Working Group will be focused on "an open, royalty-free API standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets. Over 70 companies participated in an EMVA/Khronos-hosted Exploratory Group during 2021 to develop a Scope of Work document that will guide the direction of the API design."

The hope is to create an interoperable camera API standard that can work well across hardware / software stacks to yield better portability and new opportunities for code re-use.

Today's Khronos.org announcement added, "The Camera API will be designed to provide applications, libraries and frameworks low-level, explicit control over camera runtimes, with a low-level of abstraction that still provides application portability over a wide variety of camera systems with effective, performant control to generate streams of data for consumption by downstream applications and clients."

The Khronos Group is working on this effort in cooperation with the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA). Libcamera, Matrix Vision, NVIDIA, VeriSilicon, Baler AG, and many others are involved in the early exploratory work around this in-development Camera API effort.