Magic Lantern as a Platform for Digital Photography Research

The Magic Lantern project describes itself as”Magic Lantern is a free software add-on that runs from the SD/CF card and adds a host of new features to Canon EOS cameras that weren't included from the factory by Canon.” In doing so, they have provided APIs, documentation, and the means to run code on many Canon EOS interchangeable lens cameras, and also useful well-documented interchange formats for data extracted via that access. The current work describes how these facilities can be applied by researchers to develop new imaging techniques on a professional/prosumer camera platform. Specifically, this work covers an attempt to use the Magic Lantern development tools to manipulate a cameras' Embedded Direct Memory Access engine (EDMAC) to perform on-the-fly frame diffing, and/or to the use of the project's MLV format for raw sensor data streams to extract data from the relatively large, high-performance sensor of a prosumer camera as input for alternative processing pipelines.