Welcome to FOSDEM!

FOSDEM 26 has just finished, and Ideas On Board has enjoyed the yearly trip to the largest FOSS community event in the world.

We don’t think its necessary to explain here what FOSDEM is; it’s best described as an experience as opposed to just a conference! It was great to see that the 26th edition has, once again, done such a good job at bringing together users, developers and communities of so many free and open source projects. It would be unfeasible to name them all here, but rest assured the passion for open-source and free software is thriving like never before, and that is so great to see.

Three of our engineers were on site, and these two days have been as exciting (and exhausting) as it can get.

GPU-ISP: image processing off-loading to the GPU

This FOSDEM we were finally able to share the fruits of our work with the community, started two years ago with the introduction of the Software ISP support in libcamera which is now (since libcamera 0.7) fully accelerated on the GPU thanks to the combined effort with our partners at Linaro, Qualcomm and Collabora.

GPU-ISP support was presented on Sunday in the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” devroom by Bryan and Hans, providing an overview of the most recent developments included as part of the latest libcamera 0.7 release named, not by accident, “Brussels”. The offloading of image processing to the GPU not only reduces overall CPU overload, but facilitates more complex features that wouldn’t be possible on a purely CPU-based implementation. New algorithms are expected soon and we’re eager to see them posted on the mailing list!

This is a particularly sensitive topic, not only for modern laptops which ship with MIPI -based camera systems, but also for mobile devices running Linux. Because vendors have been reluctant to share documentation regarding the ISPs included on the SoCs powering their smartphones, physical ISP support has frustratingly been unavailable. We’re happy to see GPU-ISP support promptly being adopted by the “Linux on Mobile” community, which has displayed several mobile devices at their stand, now featuring a functioning camera which doesn’t overload the CPU. A big thanks goes to this incredible community for their continued persistence, effort, and passion for Linux on mobile!

From green to great: camera tuning in the wild

Immediately following the GPU ISP presentation, our Kieran gave to the audience a peek in what it take to make camera images look great. After an introduction on the methods and tools required to tune a camera system, Kieran has outlined his plan to collect tuning images for as many devices as possible in a publicly shared database. This will help support the community effort to handle the calibration required for each device to remove the now too familiar green tint which is typical in an untuned camera system.

What’s most exciting about this is that hackers and makers around the world now have a blueprint to build their own tuning systems, share ideas and contribute to this initiative, while we continue to advance and improve the quality and performance of the libcamera algorithms for our users and customers.

The rest of the two days were divided between a countless number of hallway talks, hacking sessions on cafe tables and cheerful encounters with the many familiar faces who gather together every year in Brussels to celebrate free and open source software.

Long live FOSDEM and see you soon in a year or so!