David Orenstein writes "Stanford Computer Science researchers are developing Frankencamera, an open source, fully programmable and finely tunable camera that will allow computational photography researchers and enthusiasts to develop and test new ideas and applications — no longer limited by the features a camera manufacturer sees fit to supply. Disclosure: The submitter is a science writer for Stanford and wrote the linked article."
1. A built in clock that actually keeps time. 2. Built in GPS. 3. Some sensible connectors to upload videos in real time using appropriate external devices, or, 4. Built in Wifi/3G. 5. And all the good camera stuff.
In one device. Oh, and if you can actually make a scanning range finder at a sensible price and embed that too, that'd be great.
And what exactly do you mean by *good* camera stuff? I mean, not everyone needs (or wants) 12 megapixel full-frame sensors. For the vast majority of (not-professional) shooting, the sensors in DSLRs these days are overkill.
Personally, I'd rather have a point and shoot in my pocket (meaning I can actually use it) versus a super-expensive DSLR that always gets left at home due to bulk or concerns about damage.
There are also small-ish DSLR's and DSLR-likes that are a far cry from the full-frame beasties. See Olympus E-620 (a small DSLR), or any of the Micro Four-Thirds cameras.
You can have good image quality and optics along with small these days.
None of the cameras you suggested would fit in a sane person's pocket. Pocket sized implies something more along the lines of a Canon Powershot, complete with a tiny sensor and mediocre optics.
Though, with CHDK [wikia.com], you can do some nifty things with them.
The size and weight difference between those mediocre Powershots and LX3 is almost negligible. LX3 is still pocketable. I could say that LX3 is a superb camera vs those mediocre Powershots. Powershot G10 would be the closest competitor during their launch last year but most agree that the G10 would be harder to pocket than an LX3.
I own an LX3 and had seen/felt a G10. I bring my LX3 with me almost everyday. Could not say the same with the DSLR which rarely see office/street time.
And what exactly do you mean by *good* camera stuff? I mean, not everyone needs (or wants) 12 megapixel full-frame sensors. For the vast majority of (not-professional) shooting, the sensors in DSLRs these days are overkill.
Personally, I'd rather have a point and shoot in my pocket (meaning I can actually use it) versus a super-expensive DSLR that always gets left at home due to bulk or concerns about damage.
Its overkill until you want to take a decent picture in really bad lighting without a flash.
Agreed. Not everyone wants a huge camera. Not even a over-the-shoulder-sized superzoom or micro four thirds one.
However, interestingly, the point-and-shoots waste a lot of resources and space by exceeding the diffraction limit on common apertures. Plus their "noise-reduction" algorithms is really all about selective downsampling while maintaining file size when you operate within non-limited apertures.
You buy a 12mpx point-and-shoot, but the files themselves are closer to 6-8 mpx in terms of resolution.
I like a larger sensor, but don 't need the extra pixels. It's partly down to the high pixel density why we have so many problems with low-light noise.
Because an open source phone would most likely have open source, easily upgradable circuits so you could add the devices yourself and KNOW they will work. You could even make your OWN devices and hook them up to it, then write your own driver and have them configurable just like everything else built into the camera.
Look, here's the disclaimer: I am a software engineer. No, not hardware, software.
But I've written camera drivers from schematics and datasheets alone. It's *just not that hard*. Even for a software guy. I don't have an EE, just an interest in electronics.
And digital electronics are, quite frankly, rather simple. If you know ohm's law, and can read a datasheet or two, you could very easily put together a digital camera module. PCB express will happily etch the board for you, and you *might* have
Great! Now, where can I download the schematics and datasheets for a Canon 50D? And they don't just want camera drivers (that's done, thanks gphoto!) They want to write their own firmware.
If we could just get those, we wouldn't need FrankenCamera. But we aren't going to get them, based on past experience, so the wheel must be reinvented, again.
I hear you - we want the same thing. Our target is basically a Nokia N900 (which covers 1, 2, 3, 4 and runs linux to boot), plus a much higher quality sensor and lens.
- Andrew (one of the grad students working on the project).
I'd rather have 5 different devices which worked well.
Professionals still swap lenses because lenses are expensive and it's sometimes cheaper to replace a camera than a new lens. I've never had my camera lose more than a second over the 5-6 months that I sync it.
I have a kick ass GPS tracker that logs every 1+ second (Q-1000x). A portable drive that dumped every CF card to mirrored drive so you could keep shooting. Toss in a wireless card and make it upload too. If I wanted video, I'd get a video camera.
That's basically an iPhone or similar device but with a much more high-quality camera than at present. So basically, the device you're talking about already exists, or will exist as soon as there is sufficient demand.
People who have reason to believe that they will want to both take pictures AND be somewhere that cannot obtain GPS data at the same time. Like inside of a cave, or a large reinforced concrete building (such as those in which many photo studios are located).
I'm pretty sure that covers virtually everyone, and I'm also pretty sure that the timekeeping chip from a $10 digital wristwatch would pretty well do the trick.
The existence of prior art doesn't mean we shouldn't try and do it better. There's plenty of related work and similar projects.
We're aware of chdk (and have used it for a bunch of stuff), and it's close in some respects, but it's not the same thing. Chdk doesn't turn your camera into a fully functioning linux box, which is part of what we're trying to do, though this has also been done before sans viewfinder (www.elphel.com). You can plug random stuff in over USB, you can control the sensor with extremely low latency (by hacking the kernel if all else fails), you can ssh in, you could even run a web-server off your camera if you wanted to like the elphel cameras. Last week I plugged an SSD drive in over USB (alas no sata interface yet) to save off raw data faster. It's a fairly standard linux so it just worked.
You also have a lot more compute than you might get in something like chdk. You have access to a unified shader architecture GPU, a DSP, a CPU with an SSE-like vector coprocessor, and a fixed-function set of image processing tools (like histogram generation).
The other half of what we're trying to do is make a really good API for a programmable camera, including stuff for synchronization of multiple external devices (eg flashes), optimized image processing routines, frame-level control of the sensor at high frame rates, and camera user interface stuff, including physical widgets like buttons and dials (we use a phidgets board for this).
- Andrew (One of the grad students working on the frankencamera)
Indeed. For example, the CHDK way of doing HDR photography is a script that shoots a sequence of images at different exposure levels so you can post process them into a single image later on your PC.
Per TFA, the Frankencamera plans to take the pictures and then do the stitching and blending on the camera itself.
This looks promising. But optics being optics. a version with swings & tilts [wikipedia.org] would be really exciting for landscape/architectural/product photographers.
My knee-jerk reaction was that the proprietary lenses (Canon) and imaging chip (Nokia) would limit customization.
But they could be interchangeable, like monitors and printers on personal computers.
The Canon lens-to-camera communication protocol has been reverse-engineered for a while. Manufacturers like Sigma and Tamron are making (very good) lenses compatible with Canon (and everyone else's) bodies.
It's not a Nokia imaging chip, it's just the one that happens to be used in Nokia N95s. Aptina makes it and sells it to anyone who wants one. They do make you sign an NDA to get the full data sheet, but that's pretty much impossible to avoid.
As the poster above mentioned, Canon lenses have been thoroughly reverse-engineered.
The lenses would be fairly easy to swap out for a different optical system - we communicate with the lens controller over a simple serial link. The sensor is more involved - for one you'd need a linux kernel driver for your new sensor. Also, it's a pain to properly mount a sensor and get the all support circuitry working. None of it is secret or proprietary though, beyond the NDA you usually need to sign to get the register map for the sensor you want to use.
- Andrew (one of the grad students working on the project)
A truly open source camera would publish its lens specifications,
curvatures, focal lengths, refractive indices. This one doesn't. So it is, in fact, partially closed.
Canon license the protocols, and some manufacturers have reverse-engineered them. But that's not my
idea of a truly open-source project.
You can find such lens specifications available for most lenses in patent databases. The patents list the curvatures, indices of refraction, etc, etc. That's kind of the point of patents - when used correctly they remove the need for trade secrets. I'm not sure if this holds true for Canon lenses in particular. I agree with you that many aspects of the hardware are not as open as they could be. However, we're trying to make a camera that actually works well as a camera without reinventing too many wheels. We
I haven't tried it yet, as my current camera is a Canon G5, which isn't supported, but this site really wants my next camera to be another Canon: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK [wikia.com]
Is there a way to enable block storage mode on Canon DSLR's?
Seriously, this is a royal PITA. My father is only semi-computer-literate and has a Canon 350D. The hoops he has to jump through in order to get the pictures off of that thing are *insane* -- it literally takes an hour to copy an 8GB CF card, and if he messes up one step in the process he has to start over. (It still takes me forever, but I just let the transfer run in the background).
You could just use a card reader, but the camera craps the pictu
If he switches to Windows 7, its "Picture library" is a sort of virtual folder that encompasses multiple filesystem folders and can arrange the photos independently of those filesystem folders. It might help.
I have always wanted an Open Source printer. One that can be built and whose consumables made by those with the means without worrying about patents and all the nonsense. Think about what this could do for students and government departments.
I am personally sick and tired of shelling cash to the Lexmarks, HPs and Epsons of today. Why hasn't this taken off [yet]?
If you mean the ink: If you still shell out big time cash for that, you must be blind, because there are more offers for cheap ink, than there are banks in Luxemburg and Switzerland combined! ^^
Because a printer costs almost nothing nowadays, certainly less than its component cost to a hobbyist when you can get Lexmark's etc. for about £20 brand new. Old printers are a great source of stepper motors because of this. The major problem is the ink, which is the hard bit to make effectively and cheaply on anything other than a mass scale - so actually with a £20 Lexmark printer and some "clone" ink refill, you've basically got something orders or magnitude more efficient than you could e
This kit is FREE open source for the Cannon Powershot, with many of the features mentioned in the article, including HDR.
Download it onto a cf flash, and it replaces the Cannon OS. Many amazing images 1/50,000 milkdrop captures, night scenes etc can be found at
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK [wikia.com]
This sounds like an academic trying to make a name for himself again by labeling something that already exists with his own label. "Computational photography"? Well, how exactly did digital photography ever work without that?
Open source camera OS? Nice try, but the reason manufacturers haven't standardized on anything yet is because the technology keeps changing.
However, FWIW, Canon cameras effectively can be reprogrammed using the CHDK [wikia.com] firmware.
Computational photography is the accepted term for this subfield of computer graphics and computer vision: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=computational+photography
Secondly, we're not making an open source camera OS for existing hardware, we're making camera hardware that runs an existing open source OS - linux - with particular drivers and APIs to help you program the camera.
We're very well aware of CHDK and have used it for many projects. This is not like that (I have an earlier post that elaborates above).
When I see "Computational Photography", I think of the flatcam, a button-sized wafer with a photon-sensing surface. No lens, it instead computes the image of its surroundings. Described in fictional "Michaelmas" by Algis J. Budrys.
... once they have infected the camera with their spyware, is leave the camera collecting images constantly, looking for any personal identifying, security, or financial info, and send it over to their servers in a foreign country when network access is available.
Listen up camera manufacturers (Score:5, Interesting)
Please make a camera with:
1. A built in clock that actually keeps time.
2. Built in GPS.
3. Some sensible connectors to upload videos in real time using appropriate external devices, or,
4. Built in Wifi/3G.
5. And all the good camera stuff.
In one device. Oh, and if you can actually make a scanning range finder at a sensible price and embed that too, that'd be great.
Re:Listen up camera manufacturers (Score:4, Insightful)
And what exactly do you mean by *good* camera stuff? I mean, not everyone needs (or wants) 12 megapixel full-frame sensors. For the vast majority of (not-professional) shooting, the sensors in DSLRs these days are overkill.
Personally, I'd rather have a point and shoot in my pocket (meaning I can actually use it) versus a super-expensive DSLR that always gets left at home due to bulk or concerns about damage.
Parent
Re:Listen up camera manufacturers (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you want something like the Panasonic LX3.
There are also small-ish DSLR's and DSLR-likes that are a far cry from the full-frame beasties. See Olympus E-620 (a small DSLR), or any of the Micro Four-Thirds cameras.
You can have good image quality and optics along with small these days.
Parent
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Though, with CHDK [wikia.com], you can do some nifty things with them.
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I own an LX3 and had seen/felt a G10. I bring my LX3 with me almost everyday. Could not say the same with the DSLR which rarely see office/street time.
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And what exactly do you mean by *good* camera stuff? I mean, not everyone needs (or wants) 12 megapixel full-frame sensors. For the vast majority of (not-professional) shooting, the sensors in DSLRs these days are overkill.
Personally, I'd rather have a point and shoot in my pocket (meaning I can actually use it) versus a super-expensive DSLR that always gets left at home due to bulk or concerns about damage.
Its overkill until you want to take a decent picture in really bad lighting without a flash.
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Its overkill until you want to take a decent picture in really bad lighting without a flash.
Stop peeping in her window bro, that's not cool.
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Agreed. Not everyone wants a huge camera. Not even a over-the-shoulder-sized superzoom or micro four thirds one.
However, interestingly, the point-and-shoots waste a lot of resources and space by exceeding the diffraction limit on common apertures. Plus their "noise-reduction" algorithms is really all about selective downsampling while maintaining file size when you operate within non-limited apertures.
You buy a 12mpx point-and-shoot, but the files themselves are closer to 6-8 mpx in terms of resolution.
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Most of those things aren't software-related at all.
How would Open Source help?
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Does it really matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Look, here's the disclaimer: I am a software engineer. No, not hardware, software.
But I've written camera drivers from schematics and datasheets alone. It's *just not that hard*. Even for a software guy. I don't have an EE, just an interest in electronics.
And digital electronics are, quite frankly, rather simple. If you know ohm's law, and can read a datasheet or two, you could very easily put together a digital camera module. PCB express will happily etch the board for you, and you *might* have
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Great! Now, where can I download the schematics and datasheets for a Canon 50D?
And they don't just want camera drivers (that's done, thanks gphoto!) They want to write their own firmware.
If we could just get those, we wouldn't need FrankenCamera. But we aren't going to get them, based on past experience, so the wheel must be reinvented, again.
Re:Listen up camera manufacturers (Score:5, Informative)
- Andrew (one of the grad students working on the project).
Parent
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I'd rather have 5 different devices which worked well.
Professionals still swap lenses because lenses are expensive and it's sometimes cheaper to replace a camera than a new lens. I've never had my camera lose more than a second over the 5-6 months that I sync it.
I have a kick ass GPS tracker that logs every 1+ second (Q-1000x). A portable drive that dumped every CF card to mirrored drive so you could keep shooting. Toss in a wireless card and make it upload too. If I wanted video, I'd get a video camera.
I r
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They have SD cards that themselves speak wifi now. No dice if your camera uses CF (or some mutant format like xD or Memory Stick), of course.
Re:Listen up camera manufacturers (Score:4, Insightful)
People who have reason to believe that they will want to both take pictures AND be somewhere that cannot obtain GPS data at the same time. Like inside of a cave, or a large reinforced concrete building (such as those in which many photo studios are located).
I'm pretty sure that covers virtually everyone, and I'm also pretty sure that the timekeeping chip from a $10 digital wristwatch would pretty well do the trick.
Parent
hackable cams already available (Score:3, Informative)
My PowerShot S3-IS is scriptable. (example [wikia.com]) And it's not even a cutting edge camera. Lots of cams support scripting.
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Yeah, CHDK is awesome. I haven't tried all the features, but biggest thing for me is RAW support on a point-n-shoot (I have a Canon SD1000).
Re:hackable cams already available (Score:5, Informative)
We're aware of chdk (and have used it for a bunch of stuff), and it's close in some respects, but it's not the same thing. Chdk doesn't turn your camera into a fully functioning linux box, which is part of what we're trying to do, though this has also been done before sans viewfinder (www.elphel.com). You can plug random stuff in over USB, you can control the sensor with extremely low latency (by hacking the kernel if all else fails), you can ssh in, you could even run a web-server off your camera if you wanted to like the elphel cameras. Last week I plugged an SSD drive in over USB (alas no sata interface yet) to save off raw data faster. It's a fairly standard linux so it just worked.
You also have a lot more compute than you might get in something like chdk. You have access to a unified shader architecture GPU, a DSP, a CPU with an SSE-like vector coprocessor, and a fixed-function set of image processing tools (like histogram generation).
The other half of what we're trying to do is make a really good API for a programmable camera, including stuff for synchronization of multiple external devices (eg flashes), optimized image processing routines, frame-level control of the sensor at high frame rates, and camera user interface stuff, including physical widgets like buttons and dials (we use a phidgets board for this).
- Andrew (One of the grad students working on the frankencamera)
Parent
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Per TFA, the Frankencamera plans to take the pictures and then do the stitching and blending on the camera itself.
Could there ever be a view camera version? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do want (Score:2)
Re:Do want (Score:5, Informative)
The Canon lens-to-camera communication protocol has been reverse-engineered for a while. Manufacturers like Sigma and Tamron are making (very good) lenses compatible with Canon (and everyone else's) bodies.
Parent
Re:Do want (Score:4, Informative)
As the poster above mentioned, Canon lenses have been thoroughly reverse-engineered.
The lenses would be fairly easy to swap out for a different optical system - we communicate with the lens controller over a simple serial link. The sensor is more involved - for one you'd need a linux kernel driver for your new sensor. Also, it's a pain to properly mount a sensor and get the all support circuitry working. None of it is secret or proprietary though, beyond the NDA you usually need to sign to get the register map for the sensor you want to use.
- Andrew (one of the grad students working on the project)
Parent
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A truly open source camera would publish its lens specifications, curvatures, focal lengths, refractive indices. This one doesn't. So it is, in fact, partially closed.
Canon license the protocols, and some manufacturers have reverse-engineered them. But that's not my idea of a truly open-source project.
...laura
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I agree with you that many aspects of the hardware are not as open as they could be. However, we're trying to make a camera that actually works well as a camera without reinventing too many wheels. We
Similar work for Canon cameras... (Score:2)
I haven't tried it yet, as my current camera is a Canon G5, which isn't supported, but this site really wants my next camera to be another Canon: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK [wikia.com]
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Is there a way to enable block storage mode on Canon DSLR's?
Seriously, this is a royal PITA. My father is only semi-computer-literate and has a Canon 350D. The hoops he has to jump through in order to get the pictures off of that thing are *insane* -- it literally takes an hour to copy an 8GB CF card, and if he messes up one step in the process he has to start over. (It still takes me forever, but I just let the transfer run in the background).
You could just use a card reader, but the camera craps the pictu
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If he switches to Windows 7, its "Picture library" is a sort of virtual folder that encompasses multiple filesystem folders and can arrange the photos independently of those filesystem folders. It might help.
Nikon offer an SDK for many of their cameras (Score:4, Informative)
http://sdk.nikonimaging.com/apply/ [nikonimaging.com]
D5000, D3x, D90, D700, D40, D60, D3, D300, D200, D80
And NEF (RAW) files
Always wanted a printer (Score:4, Interesting)
I have always wanted an Open Source printer. One that can be built and whose consumables made by those with the means without worrying about patents and all the nonsense. Think about what this could do for students and government departments.
I am personally sick and tired of shelling cash to the Lexmarks, HPs and Epsons of today. Why hasn't this taken off [yet]?
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If you mean the ink: If you still shell out big time cash for that, you must be blind, because there are more offers for cheap ink, than there are banks in Luxemburg and Switzerland combined! ^^
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Because manufacturing stuff in the real world, especially complicated precision stuff like printers - is very expensive. It's nothing like software.
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Because a printer costs almost nothing nowadays, certainly less than its component cost to a hobbyist when you can get Lexmark's etc. for about £20 brand new. Old printers are a great source of stepper motors because of this. The major problem is the ink, which is the hard bit to make effectively and cheaply on anything other than a mass scale - so actually with a £20 Lexmark printer and some "clone" ink refill, you've basically got something orders or magnitude more efficient than you could e
Why use the EOS mount? (Score:2, Funny)
What about CHDK? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Damn...the one week I don't seem to have mod points. Your post should be modded "+100 one of the most useful replies ever"!
nice PR stunt (Score:3, Informative)
This sounds like an academic trying to make a name for himself again by labeling something that already exists with his own label. "Computational photography"? Well, how exactly did digital photography ever work without that?
Open source camera OS? Nice try, but the reason manufacturers haven't standardized on anything yet is because the technology keeps changing.
However, FWIW, Canon cameras effectively can be reprogrammed using the CHDK [wikia.com] firmware.
Re:nice PR stunt (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, we're not making an open source camera OS for existing hardware, we're making camera hardware that runs an existing open source OS - linux - with particular drivers and APIs to help you program the camera.
We're very well aware of CHDK and have used it for many projects. This is not like that (I have an earlier post that elaborates above).
Parent
You call that computational photography? (Score:2)
What scammers might do (Score:2)
... once they have infected the camera with their spyware, is leave the camera collecting images constantly, looking for any personal identifying, security, or financial info, and send it over to their servers in a foreign country when network access is available.
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It should be fairly easy to reverse engineer - Sigma and Tokina among others produce third-party lenses that mate with Canon/Nikon/etc DSLRs.
Not the protocols: the actual lenses themselves. The optical stuff.
Besides, I always thought the best lenses had M42x1 threads on them. :-)
...laura
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If you're out, I have a few extras you can borrow:
s s s s
s s s
You're welcome!