Easily connect to and stream video feeds from a wide range of USB-based camera equipment using IOTech’s USB camera device connector
What is USB Camera?
- A USB camera, also known as a webcam, is a small digital camera that connects to a computer via a USB (Universal Serial Bus) port
- USB cameras are widely used for video conferencing, live streaming, remote learning, content creation and surveillance
- Their small, portable nature and the prevalence of USB interfaces means they are easily transported and will work with most if not all desktops, laptops and gateways etc
- Compared to more formally specified equipment such as ONVIF, USB cameras can be very low-cost and a simple means for capturing video at the edge
- There are usually rather less functions available than ONVIF, but the most important aspect – the video feed itself - can still be retrieved and delivered for viewing by human operators or passed to edge analytics or video inference engines which can infer valuable information from the feeds. E.g., the identification of specific products or the number of people detected in an area
IOTech’s USB device connector allows for standardized remote access of USB-based video cameras and their video feeds
The USB Camera device connector supports the following key features:
- Camera metadata retrieval
- Camera status retrieval
- Video streaming retrieval including start/stop and auto streaming commands
- Configurable video streaming options such as frames per second, image size, pixel format, aspect ratio, video codec, and video quality
- Auto discovery of the locally connected cameras
Note that the USB device connector works only on Linux with kernel v5.10 or higher