Exploratory Group to Look Into Royalty-Free API Standards

The goal of the Exploratory Group is to probe industry interest in the creation of open, royalty-free API standards for controlling embedded cameras and sensors. Their belief is that consistent standards and guidelines could streamline deployment by manufacturers and integrators.

Camera manufacturers, silicon vendors, and software developers working on vision and sensor processing have been invited to participate in the initiative. Leaders in technology that have expressed their interest in participating include AMD, Facebook, Google, HP, Huawei, NVIDIA, Oculus and Qualcomm, amongst others. Those involved in machine vision such as Allied Vision, Basler AG, Baumer, MVTec, and Stemmer Imaging AG are also set to attend.

Participants will discuss use cases and requirements for new interoperability standards to accelerate market growth and reduce development costs in embedded markets using vision and sensor processing and associated acceleration. The Group is open to all proposals and relevant topics but will not discuss detailed technical design contributions to protect participants’ intellectual property (IP). Open discussion is encouraged by each participant via non-disclosure agreements.

EMVA President, Dr Chris Yates, stated, ‘This Exploratory Group is an excellent approach to understanding broader industry needs and will bring together many companies and views in an open forum.’ His feelings were echoed by Neil Trevett, The Khronos® Group president who said, ‘Judging by the significant industry interest, the time seems right to organize an effort around identifying and aligning on the need for interoperability APIs for embedded cameras and sensors … and we are delighted that the two organizations are working together to bring a meaningful quorum from diverse parts of the industry into this cooperative exploratory process.’

The two non-profit organisations seek to emulate a similar project they collaborated on in April 2019 where they investigated the creation of standards and guidelines for the production and distribution of real-time 3D representations of products. If the Exploratory Group reaches significant consensus the EMVA and The Khronos® Group will work to initiate the proposed standardization initiatives at the appropriate organization.

You can find more information about the initiative here. For more from MVPro, click here.