libcamera Celebrates Its First Release As Camera Support Library For Linux

Libcamera has been in development for several years now as an open-source camera support library that works across Linux, Android, and Chrome OS platforms. Due to interest from seeing tagged releases, the libcamera crew has published their first official release of this open-source camera stack.

Libcamera has been seeing great progress and adoption over the past three years while today celebrates its first official release. Libcamera describes itself on the libcamera.org project site as:

A complex camera support library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS

Cameras are complex devices that need heavy hardware image processing operations. Control of the processing is based on advanced algorithms that must run on a programmable processor. This has traditionally been implemented in a dedicated MCU in the camera, but in embedded devices algorithms have been moved to the main CPU to save cost. Blurring the boundary between camera devices and Linux often left the user with no other option than a vendor-specific closed-source solution.

To address this problem the Linux media community is collaborating with the industry to develop a camera stack that is open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. libcamera was born out of that collaboration and offers modern camera support to Linux-based systems, including traditional Linux distributions, ChromeOS and Android.

Ultimately libcamera may end up helping out modern Intel laptops otherwise stuck to proprietary web camera software stacks, there is libcamera support for the Raspberry Pi, and many other possible use-cases.

This first release of this open-source Linux camera support library is libcamera 0.0.1.