Integrating a Digital Camera in the Home Environment: Architecture and Prototype

Electronic photography is gaining parts of the photography market and tends to replace gradually all argentic photography. The combination of digital camera and computer technologies have allowed to provide new services like visualising quickly snapshots on a computer with the possibility of direct snapshot touch up or printing. Lately the apparition of a new type of memory proposes the extension of capacities of camera storage to a few thousands of photos. Otherwise home devices like Set-Top-Boxes associated with TV and mobile devices like mobile phone and PDA offer various possibilities of connection and can execute dynamically loaded programs. In this paper, we present the new concept of digital album which is a photo album stored on the camera's memory with multi-criteria indexing methods to make efficient snapshots retrieval. We also propose a new architecture around the numeric camera that permits to widen the specter of services proposed. Finally this article gives details about our prototype built in our laboratory to validate the architecture and to estimate the code size.