Android Camera2 Basics API

Question

I am reading the code about Android Camera2 APIs from here: https://github.com/googlesamples/android-Camera2Basic

And it is confusing in this lines: https://github.com/googlesamples/android-Camera2Basic/blob/master/Application/src/main/java/com/example/android/camera2basic/Camera2BasicFragment.java#L570-L574

that the previewRequest builder only add surface, which is the TextureView to show, as target. But the following line actually add both as the targets. As I understand, this should not fire the "OnImageAvailable" Lisenter during preview, no? So why this add the imagereader's surface here?

I tried to removed this imagereader's surface here but got error when I really want to capture an image.....

SOOO CONFUSING!!!

Answer 1

You need to declare all output Surfaces that image data might be sent to at the time you create a CameraCaptureSession. This is just the way the framework is designed.

Whenever you create a CaptureRequest, you add a (list of) target output Surface(s). This is where the image data from the captured frame will go- it may be a Surface associated with a TextureView for displaying, or with an ImageReader for saving, or with an Allocation for processing, etc. (A Surface is really just a buffer which can take the data output by the camera. The type of object that buffer is associated with determines how you can access/work with the data.)

You don't have to send the data from each frame to all registered Surfaces, but it has to be sent to a subset of them. You can't add a Surface as a target to a CaptureRequest if it wasn't registered with the CameraCaptureSession when it was created. Well, you can, but passing it to the session will cause a crash, so don't.