Libcamera Maturing Well As Open-Source Camera Stack

Libcamera as an open-source camera stack that has been coming together over the past few years has been maturing quite well, broadening its supported hardware and feature set, and more in filling a void in the Linux camera ecosystem.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Laurent Pinchart presented yesterday at the Embedded Linux Conference around libcamera and how it has developed over the past three years, the current state, and some of the future work for improving Linux camera support.

Some of the new platform support for libcamera has included MediaTek and NXP chips as well as the Librem 5 smartphone, and IPA module support around the Intel IPU3. Libcamera has also been seeing work on its re-processing API, new controls and properties, Python bindings are being developed, native support in the Chromium web browser is available, and moving towards an API freeze for a libcamera 1.0 release.

This user-space camera framework is also working towards per-stream controls, zero shutter lag, exposure bracketing HDR, logical camera devices, open-source IPA modules, GPU-based processing with shaders, and new device support.

The Embedded Linux Conference 2021 video isn't currently available but there is the slide deck for those interested in the topic. Those wishing to learn more about this open-source camera stack in general can visit libcamera.org.