Beaverton, OR – The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, together with the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) announces the formation of a new Khronos Working Group 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-hosted 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.
Cameras are increasingly critical in diverse markets, motivating the development of increasingly sophisticated optical systems, image sensors, and vision processors often utilizing machine learning technology. However, the lack of interoperable camera API standards increases application development time and maintenance costs while reducing portability and opportunity for code reuse, resulting in unnecessarily high integration costs for camera technologies.
"The Embedded Camera API Exploratory Group followed the Khronos New Initiative Process with invaluable cooperation from the EMVA. Over seventy companies worked together from March to December 2021 to forge strong industry consensus on the need, terminology, scope, requirements, and design methodology for a new open standard camera system API," says Neil Trevett, Khronos president. "Now, we warmly invite any interested companies, vendors and developers to bring their voice and their expertise to the design phase of this important work."
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 close and productive collaboration between the EMVA and Khronos has been very effective in enabling a broader industry participation and diversity of perspectives at the Embedded Camera Exploratory Group than either organization could have achieved working alone," says Chris Yates, EMVA president. "EMVA will continue to work closely with Khronos under our new liaison agreement to ensure that the interests of both the EMVA membership and the wider industry are represented at the new Camera API working group."
The Camera API Working Group will start meetings in February 2022 and is expected to be of particular interest to sensor or camera manufacturers, silicon vendors, and software developers working on vision and sensor processing. Any organization is welcome to join Khronos and participate in this global initiative under the consortium’s multi-company governance process. Please visit the Khronos membership page or contact [email protected] for more details.
Industry Support for the Camera API Working
Over 70 companies participated in the Camera Exploratory group and the following companies support establishing the Camera API Working Group: Adimec, Almalence Inc., Analog Devices Inc., Basler AG, Baumer Optronic GmbH, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Collabora, Digica, Digital Air Technologies, Euresys, European Machine Vision Association, FLIR Integrated Imaging Solutions, Google, Groget, Holochip Corporation, Ideas on Board Oy, LunarG Inc., MATRIX VISION, MM Solutions, MVTec Software GmbH, NVIDIA, Perey Research & Consulting, Phil-Vision, Pleora Technologies, Raspberry PI Ltd, STEMMER IMAGING, Texas Instruments, VeriSilicon, Vision Components.
About EMVA
The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) is a non-for-profit and non-commercial association representing the Machine Vision industry in Europe that is open for all types of organizations having a stake in machine vision, computer vision, embedded vision or imaging technologies: manufacturers, system and machine builders, integrators, distributors, consultancies, research organizations and academia. The EMVA hosts four international vision standards, and all members – as the 100% owners of the association – benefit from the dedicated networking, standardization, and cooperation activities of the EMVA. For more information, visit www.emva.org.
About Khronos
The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 180 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. For more information, visit www.khronos.org/.
