Robust camera architecture to support specialized camera systems

Live camera applications have historically kept to a simple view of cameras as a single-stream of images that can be displayed in a single, two-dimensional view. Because of the inherent limitation in doing this, existing frameworks are not flexible enough to enable custom camera systems involving multiple image streams or cameras that have special display needs. This has left a need for a new architecture that can support those camera systems that are held back by the classic view of a camera. This architecture will illustrate how it can be extended through plug-ins to support any kind of camera configuration and display available today. It will also show that it can accomplish this while still providing at least 25 FPS performance on a 5 MP image stream. In addition, attempts are made to show how multi-stream image synchronization can be achieved as an extension of the architecture in order to support the primary camera target, a HemView camera system. This thesis also serves as documentation for the architecture that was created and how each of the provided plug-ins were built to fit into the system