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 has very recently started collaboration with the industry to develop a camera stack that will be open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. libcamera was born out of that collaboration and will offer modern camera support to Linux-based systems, including traditional Linux distributions, ChromeOS and Android.

To fetch the sources, build and install:

git clone git://linuxtv.org/libcamera.git
cd libcamera
meson build
ninja -C build install

The following Debian/Ubuntu packages are required for building libcamera. Other distributions may have differing package names:

A C++ toolchain: [required]

Either {g++, clang}

for libcamera: [required]

meson (>= 0.47) ninja-build python3-yaml

If your distribution doesn't provide a recent enough version of meson, you can install or upgrade it using pip3.

pip3 install --user meson
pip3 install --user --upgrade meson

for device hotplug enumeration: [optional]

pkg-config libudev-dev

for documentation: [optional]

python3-sphinx doxygen

for gstreamer: [optional]

libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev

for IPA module signing: [required]

libgnutls28-dev openssl

for qcam: [optional]

qtbase5-dev libqt5core5a libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5

To use GStreamer plugin from source tree, set the following environment so that GStreamer can find it.

export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=$(pwd)/build/src/gstreamer

The debugging tool gst-launch-1.0 can be used to construct and pipeline and test it. The following pipeline will stream from the camera named "Camera 1" onto the default video display element on your system.

gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc camera-name="Camera 1" ! videoconvert ! autovideosink