Android camera preview on SurfaceTexture
This is my scenario: I am trying to take a picture from the front camera when someone puts in the incorrect password in the lock screen. Basically, I need to be able to take a picture out of the front cam without a preview. After much googling, I figured out that the way to do it is opengl and SurfaceTexture. You direct the camera preview to a SurfaceTexture, and later extract the picture from this texture somehow. I found this out from the following resources: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10776349/902572 (suggestion 1) http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Android-opengl/Android-OpenGL-App-Access