While the Nexus 5 comes with ticks in almost every box, especially in the price section, one complaint that has stood out has been the camera. Google seems to want to fix this, as evident by comments seen in the public Android source code, which suggest that the company is working on a new camera API for Android.
First spotted by Josh Brown on Google+, the thread shows that work for this started in December 2012. While the new API seems to be targeted for KitKat, a month before the official release, the API was pulled from Android’s framework code. The commit that removed the API from the release Android code came with a comment that said, “DO NOT MERGE: Hide new camera API. Not ready yet. Bug 11141002.” The date on the commit shows that it was pushed on October 11, around a month before KitKat was officially announced. It can be assumed that the month before release was devoted to fixing bugs in time for release, while work on new features was stopped. By the time the official launch date arrived, it looked like the new camera API was not able to make the final cut and was instead replaced by the older camera API. The meat of the matter can be found in the initial commit from December, though, which comes with a lot of details about the new camera setup.
Google is working on a new camera API
A new API class titled “Android.hardware.photography" can be seen, different from the “android.hardware.camera” class that the current camera functionality falls under. The class states that full-capability devices allow for per-frame control of capture hardware and post-processing parameters at high frame rates. They also provide output data at high resolution in uncompressed formats, in addition to compressed JPEG output. While the new camera API supports backwards-compatibility mode for older devices, “full-capability” devices will get their hands on a few new picture formats. When you compare the image formats present in Jelly Bean, the only one that is not supported in the camera is RAW. Most smartphone cameras output JPEG files, which come as compressed, mostly finalised images. RAW, on the other hand, is relatively lesser compressed and unprocessed, allowing users to do a whole lot more after the photograph is shot through image-editing tools like Photoshop. The new API also comes with face detection. This includes bounding boxes around faces and centre coordinates for the eyes and mouth. The system can also set unique IDs for each face, as long as they stay on screen for a sufficient amount of time to be detected, allowing developers to do a variety of things, like adding silly hats to multiple faces in a video feed. Burst mode is also supported, a feature that is currently missing from Nexus devices. The new API, strangely enough, comes with support for a removable camera. This is the first time that there has been mention of a removable camera on an Android device of any kind, and it will be intriguing to see what Google actually means by this. There is no mention in the API about image quality, though, and there is no way to ascertain whether this has been worked on until the finished software and supported devices come our way. There is also no mention yet on when the finished software will start rolling out for devices.
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