In collaboration with the European Machine Vision Alliance (EMVA), the Khronos Group formed a new working group that aims to develop an open, royalty-free API standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets. More than 70 companies participated in an EMVA-Khronos exploratory group during 2021 to develop a scope of work document that will guide the direction of the API design. Design work is expected to start in February 2022, and any organization is invited to join Khronos to participate.

The camera API will be designed to provide application, 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.

“Open interface standards such as GenICam or GigE Vision have been a key element to establish a professional machine vision market. Only by such standards we can ensure the interoperability of products from different vendors,” said Arndt Bake, chief digital officer at Basler AG. “It helped to shorten the development cycles of customers dramatically and also yields in a faster growing market. Therefore, we strongly support the new open standard camera API initiative driven by Khronos and the EMVA.”

“With the strong growth of camera applications in automotive, IoT, AR/VR devices, wearables, and smartphones, there has been a strong demand for a standardized camera API in the industry,” said Weijin Dai, executive vice president of VeriSilicon. “The standardized camera API that the Khronos group is working on will help facilitate the deployment of new cameras by reducing porting efforts, simplifying the procedures of camera upgrades, and improving the interoperability among various camera devices.”

The Camera API Working Group will begin meetings in February.