Concurrent camera streaming

Android allows devices to support concurrent streaming of camera devices. For example, this allows a device to have both the front and back cameras operating at the same time. From Android 11, the Camera2 API includes the following methods that apps can call to determine if the cameras support concurrent streaming and the stream configurations that are supported.

• getConcurrentCameraIds: Gets the set of combinations of currently connected camera device identifiers that support configuring camera device sessions concurrently.
• isConcurrentSessionConfigurationSupported: Checks whether the provided set of camera devices and their corresponding session configurations can be configured concurrently.

A set of mandatory stream combinations that must be supported during concurrent streaming are included through a camera device's camera characteristics in the SCALER_MANDATORY_CONCURRENT_STREAM_COMBINATIONS property.

Each camera device advertised through getConcurrentStreamingCameraIds() must support the following guaranteed configurations for concurrent streams.

Devices with the MONOCHROME capability (CameraCharacteristics#REQUEST_AVAILABLE_CAPABILITIES includes CameraMetadata#REQUEST_AVAILABLE_CAPABILITIES_MONOCHROME) supporting Y8 must support substituting YUV streams with Y8 in all guaranteed stream combinations.

s720p refers to 720p (1280 x 720) or the maximum supported resolution for the particular format returned by StreamConfigurationMap.getOutputSizes(). s1440p refers to 1440p (1920 x 1440) or the maximum supported resolution for the particular format returned by StreamConfigurationMap.getOutputSizes(). Devices whose capabilities don't include ANDROID_REQUEST_AVAILABLE_CAPABILITIES_BACKWARD_COMPATIBLE must support at least a single Y16 stream, Dataspace::DEPTH with sVGA resolution, during concurrent operation, where sVGA is the smaller of the two following resolutions:

• maximum output resolution for the given format
• 640 x 480

Implementation

To allow apps to query a device to determine if its cameras support concurrent streaming, implement the ICameraProvider@2.6 HAL interface, which includes the following methods:

• getConcurrentStreamingCameraIds
• isConcurrentStreamCombinationSupported

For a reference implementation of the ICameraProvider@2.6HAL interface, see the emulated camera HAL library at EmulatedCameraProviderHWLImpl.cpp.

Validation

To test that your implementation of this feature works as intended, use the ConcurrentCameraTest.java CTS test. Also, test using an app that opens up multiple cameras and operates them concurrently.

Resource allocations problems

If camera HALs advertise support for concurrent operation of camera devices, they might run into resource allocation problems, especially in the case where there are enough image signal processor (ISP) resources on the phone to stream both front and back (or other) cameras concurrently, but not to their full capacity. In this case, the camera HAL must allocate limited hardware resources to each camera device.

Example scenario

The following scenario demonstrates this problem.

Problem

The device has the following configuration:

• Camera ID 0 is a logical camera backed by a wide and ultra-wide camera, which each take one ISP resource.
• Camera ID 1 is a camera which takes one ISP resource.

The device (phone) has two ISPs. If camera ID 0 is opened and a session is configured, it's possible that the camera HAL reserves two ISPs anticipating both ultrawide and wide camera use.

If that's the case, the front camera (ID 1) can't configure any streams because both ISPs are in use.

Solution

To address this problem, the framework can open both camera IDs 0 and 1 before configuring sessions to provide a hint to the camera HAL about how to allocate resources (because it now expects concurrent operation of cameras). However, this can lead to limited capabilities, for example, zoom might not be able to handle the full zoom range ratio (because switching physical camera IDs might be problematic).

To implement this solution, make the following updates to provider@2.6::ICameraProvider::getConcurrentCameraStreamingCameraIds.

• Mandate that for concurrent operation of cameras, the camera framework must open camera devices (@3.2::ICameraDevice::open) before configuring any sessions on the camera devices. This allows camera providers to allocate resources accordingly.

• To address the issue of not being able to handle the full zoom range ratio, ensure that camera apps, when using cameras concurrently, are guaranteed to use the ZOOM_RATIO control setting between only 1x and MAX_DIGITAL_ZOOM instead of the complete ZOOM_RATIO_RANGE (this prevents the switching of physical cameras internally, which potentially requires more ISPs).

Problem with testDualCameraPreview

When you make the updates above, it can create a problem with a behavior allowed by the MultiViewTest.java#testDualCameraPreview test.

The test testDualCameraPreview doesn't configure sessions only after opening all cameras. It follows this sequence:

for each camera  in cameraDevices :
  device = openCamera(camera)
     createCaptureSession(device);

It does, however, tolerate camera open failures with ERROR_MAX_CAMERAS_IN_USE [1]. Third-party apps might depend on this behavior.

Because the camera HAL won't know the complete set of camera IDs being opened for concurrent operation before configuring sessions, it could be hard for it to allocate hardware resources (assuming there is some competition for them).

To address this problem, maintaining backward compatibility in addition to supporting concurrent streaming, camera HALs should fail openCamera calls with ERROR_MAX_CAMERAS_IN_USE if they can't support full stream configuration for all cameras running concurrently.