Windows 10 IoT Core – Sample Camera applications

Public release of Windows 10 IoT Core is announced for Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnow board Max recently. It supported UVC stack and media foundation class in the release. As I am working on a company (e-con systems) which is expert in design and manufacture the industrial camera modules, I would like to evaluate Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2 with few of our USB cameras modules.

As you know Microsoft introduced the Universal Windows Platform(UWP) from Windows 10, Which means application developed using UWP can run on Windows 10 PC, mobile and IOT core devices. So I searched for camera sample applications for windows 10 and found the following list of sample UWP applications for camera from the Github.

• CameraFaceDetection
•  CameraGetPreviewFrame
•  CameraHdr
•  CameraStarterKit
•  CameraVideoStabilization

I am able to build and deploy successfully all these application on Raspberry Pi 2. Now I realised the advantage of UWP applications and the one core windows 10. The Earlier Windows Embedded Compact OS are unique versions which are not common to other versions of Windows. You can find the similarity of the OS features but not exactly the same and it should be subset of the PC windows OS. You have to port the PC application to Windows Embedded Compact OS and it is not a simple build like the UWP applications.

Unfortunately due to the performance bottleneck of Raspberry Pi 2 USB 2.0 port and unavailability of DirectX drivers, preview frame rate is dropped down and just got 5 to 10 FPS even in lower resolutions such as 640x480. But actually the USB camera module is capable of sending 30 fps in this resolution. Hope we can get a better performance on Minnow board Max but I don’t have it to test it.