sane
The SANE Scanner Interface
David Mosberger
  David.Mosberger@acm.org
 This article
    originally appeared in Linux Journal Issue 47, March 1998
Abstract
  SANE stands for ``Scanner Access Now Easy''. It is a universal
  interface that enables you to acquire images from any device that
  produces raster images, including flatbed scanners, video and still
  cameras and frame grabbers. The intent of SANE is to make it
  possible to write image-processing applications without having to
  worry about peculiarities of individual devices. Looking at it from
  the other side, SANE makes it possible to write a device driver once
  and only once. That same device driver can then be used by any
  SANE-compliant application.