Libcamera Maturing Well As Open-Source Camera Stack

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 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...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=libcamera-2021

[waxhead]

Apologies for potentially derailing the thread, but it is not totally of topic after all: does anyone know if there exists free, alternative firmware implementation for various network cameras?!

[ari55]

Apologies for potentially derailing the thread, but it is not totally of topic after all: does anyone know if there exists free, alternative firmware implementation for various network cameras?!

Something like this ?

https://github.com/AravisProject/aravis

[treba]

Really cool project! Unfortunately they don't mention Pipewire + xdg-portals in the presentation. I personally hope that more and more apps that only need "simple" features will use them instead (Pipewire has a libcamera backend, so it will still use libcamera) because it allows for sandboxing / access control. There is some work in progress for OBS Studio, WebRTC (Firefox/Chromium) and some Gnome apps like Cheese AFAIK.

[SteamPunker]

... and NXP chips as well as the Librem 5 smartphone, ...

A bit of a nitpick perhaps, but this is somewhat redundant, since the Librem 5 smartphone is actually based on an NXP chip. Maybe "and NXP chips such as the one in the Librem 5 smartphone" would be a more fitting way to describe this.

[marlock]

Librem 5 implies a full set of hardware in a specific arrangement...

it's a specific camera sensor with a specific wiring to the NXP CPU chip

handling specific camera sensors is just as important as being able to optimize image processing in the CPU/GPU before, during and after the shutter clicks

[marlock]

unsurprisingly, raspberry pi is at the forefront in implementing libcamera too, with their open-hardware SBC and 2 open-hardware camera modules:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/an-open-source-camera-stack-for-raspberry-pi-using-libcamera/

[Danniello]

I'm still very surprised how smartphone camera software is capable nowadays. I mean for example Google proprietary camera stack in Pixel phones - they capturing multiple photos every second and merging it into excellent photo probably using some very sophisticated AI algorithms.

Sadly all of it is proprietary. Probably such AI cannot be "recreated" by open-source enthusiasts without access to billions of photos that is accessible only for bigdata companies...

Google algorithms are going even further - very realistic upscaling!!!

https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/07/high-fidelity-image-generation-using.html

What next?! CSI uncrop?!

[uid313]

Can it do software-based improvements to the image like Google Camera which uses advanced machine learning algorithms to improve the photo quality?
Can it take HDR photos?
Does it support AR?

GNOME Cheese have only lame filters, not cool filters like Snapchat.

[geearf]

I'm still very surprised how smartphone camera software is capable nowadays. I mean for example Google proprietary camera stack in Pixel phones - they capturing multiple photos every second and merging it into excellent photo probably using some very sophisticated AI algorithms.

Sadly all of it is proprietary. Probably such AI cannot be "recreated" by open-source enthusiasts without access to billions of photos that is accessible only for bigdata companies...

Google algorithms are going even further - very realistic upscaling!!!

https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/07/high-fidelity-image-generation-using.html

What next?! CSI uncrop?!

Damn, that upscaling is scary good!
And here I was thinking anime4k was already some kind of magic but this is another level...