Integrating a digital camera in the home environment: architecture and prototype

Digital photography is gaining parts of the photography market and is tending to gradually replace all silver-based photography. The combination of digital cameras and computer technologies have allowed the provision of new services, such as the rapid visualisation of snapshots on a computer with the possibility of direct snapshot touch-up or printing. Lately, the appearance of a new type of memory proposes the extension of camera storage capacities to a few thousand photos. In addition, home devices like set-top boxes associated with TVs and mobile devices like mobile phones and PDAs offer various possibilities for connection and can execute dynamically loaded programs. In this paper, we present the new concept of a digital album, which is a photograph album stored in the camera´s memory with multi-criteria indexing methods to allow efficient retrieval of snapshots. We also propose a new architecture around the digital camera that permits us to widen the spectrum 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