The Khronos Kamaros (pronounced Kam-a-ross) API Working Group is the result of an extensive exploratory process that involved over seventy companies working together from March to December 2021 to forge a strong industry consensus on the need, terminology, scope, requirements, and design methodology for a new open standard camera system API. The results from this process are captured in the Scope Of Work document which is now being used to guide the direction of the working group. The group started formal meetings in February 2022 to work on the development of the API specification and its associated ecosystem. On October 6, 2022 the working group officially adopted the ‘Kamaros’ name.
Any organization is welcome to join Khronos and participate in this global initiative. Participation can put your organization at the forefront of the development of the standard and is expected to be of particular interest to sensor or camera manufacturers, silicon vendors, and software developers working on vision and sensor processing. Learn more.
Cameras are increasingly critical in diverse markets, accelerating the development of 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.
Embedded vision systems are increasingly integrating camera sensors tightly with image, vision, and inferencing accelerators in self-contained systems. Embedded vision applications on these integrated systems often lack a pervasively available API to portably generate sensor streams for local accelerated processing.
An effective open, cross-vendor open standard for camera, sensor and ISP control could provide multiple benefits
The Kamaros API design will provide applications, libraries, and frameworks explicit control over camera runtimes, through a precisely defined interface that enables:
At the AutoSensONLINE 2021 event panellists from Khronos, EMVA, and members of the original Camera Exploratory Group discussed how a consistent set of interoperability standards and guidelines for embedded cameras and sensors will help solve the problems impeding growth in advanced sensor deployment.
Any organization is welcome to join Khronos and participate in this global initiative under the consortium’s multi-company governance process that enables all stakeholders to have a voice in consensus-based working group decisions. For more information on our standardization procedures and to join please visit the Khronos membership page or contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for more details.
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The EMVA manages the GenICam standard for machine vision which is a widely used generic programming interface for industrial cameras that has become increasingly sophisticated as digital cameras integrate local processing capabilities.
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.