Nokia releases the new FCam platform for Nokia N900

Published on Jul 22, 2010

Nokia N900 receives a new open-source digital photography platform FCam

Published on Mar 17, 2011

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The Nokia Research Center in California and Stanford University have developed and released a novel and open-source digital photography platform called FCam, also known as Frankencamera. It offers many photography applications to the user while enabling developers to create improved capabilities for digital cameras. To facilitate the user, free downloading of this platform is available for Nokia N900 at http://fcam.garage.maemo.org/.The Nokia N900 model runs a similar version of Linux as installed on personal computers. For this reason, the phone was selected as the host device for the FCam API platform. As a part of the Camera 2.0 project, FCam offers new camera applications to enable the users to overcome the existing limitations in the camera software and mobile hardware segment. Some researchers have already developed a new series of photography applications for this platform, of which, some would be available for free download from the FCam project pages. FCamera, Low-light Assistant and HDR Capture are some of the applications.FCamera is among those camera applications that uses FCam libraries and drivers and serves as a gateway for all programmers in creating customised camera applications. The Low-light Assistant automatically combines two images captured in rapid succession resulting in a sharp and bright image. HDR Capture is useful when there is too much light. The camera captures up to three images with varied exposure settings, combining them to produce an image that represents details of both the background and foreground objects without any under or over exposure.Photo-trickery is another application that would soon be available. An upcoming research paper captures the position and trajectory of playing cards that are thrown into the air with complete clarity through 2 independent flash units. The paper would be presented at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los angeles next week. It is anticipated that once FCam is publicly available, camera programmers and Nokia developers would work together to develop an innovative series of programmable camera applications. 

 

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