We are currently working on two camera-based products: our own Big-Eye security camera system and a  small hand-held digital camera.  Both of these cameras have the requirement of a user being able to connect to them from a desktop computer to manage and download the images. However, the primary connection method for Big-Eye is Ethernet, while the other camera uses USB. There is a standardised protocol called PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) which has specifications for both IP and USB. PTP is a widely recognised standard. It is used by most consumer digital cameras and is supported 'out of the box' by most major operating systems.

PTP allows users to download images (and other files) from a camera and delete unwanted images. It also supports camera properties which can be used to view and control the camera's date and time, exposure time, battery level, etc. In developing software support for PTP on our camera products we have written a generic, transport independent PTP layer, which implements each of the PTP commands and properties, and also contains code for managing the images on a camera. This generic layer calls transport specific (IP or USB) functions for sending and receiving data packets. The major benefit of this approach is that any new features, or bug fixes, we make to the generic PTP layer are automatically inherited by both the IP and USB cameras.

Combining this PTP code with the image capture software develloped for Big-Eye (which includes featuers such as threaded image capture, Bayer conversion and JPEG encoding) we now have a full Linux-based software solution for consumer grade cameras.