SciCamera

Consistent and reliable imaging for scientific applications.

Why SciCamera?

Scientific imaging applications often require minimal post-processing pipelines, precise capture timing, near-gapless sequential frames, and easily configurable settings like gain, resolution, bit-depth, and exposure length.

This project, which began as fork of the webcam/video-focused picamera2 library, aims to make it easy to configure and use cameras for scientific applications, with a focus on performance, reliability, code quality, and maintainability.

Why not SciCamera?

SciCamera currently focuses on high-quality, timing-sensitive, minimally-processed still images. For low-bandwidth, real-time image and video streaming, we recommend the picamera2 library.

Platform support

SciCamera supports

• Raspberry Pi OS (Bullseye or later), 64-bit.
• x86 Ubuntu

Other debian flavors are likely to be supported. We welcome pull requests to extend the testing toolchains to cover your platform.

Installation

SciCamera is a pure python package, but relies on the python c++ wrapper of libcamera.

SciCamera can be installed simply with:

pip install scicamera

Installing libcamera + python bindings

Import and use of the above pacakge requires that libcamera to be built with the python package enabled. On rasbian, this is accomplished by installing the libcamera package from apt. In x86 it must be built using something like the following:

git clone https://github.com/Exclosure/libcamera.git
cd libcamera
git checkout v0.0.4
meson setup build -D pycamera=enabled
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

Bugs/Contributing

Open an issue/PR to discuss your bug or feature. Once a course of action has been identified, open a PR, discuss the changes.

Feature creep is not of interest, but we would be happy to help you build your more complicated project on top of this.

If we like them, and the tests pass we will merge them. CI requires code has been processed isort and black toolchains.

Doing this is pretty easy:

isort .
black .

Great work.

Publishing to PYPI

Should be added to github action later

1. Add your pypi token

$ poetry config pypi-token.pypi my-token

2. Cut a new tag

$ git tag -a v0.1.0 -m "Version 0.1.0"
$ git push origin v0.1.0

3. Publish

$ poetry publish --build