Windows Imaging

Windows imaging includes the following two components:

Windows Image Acquisition (WIA). Still image peripherals include digital cameras and scanning devices such as sheet-fed, flatbed, handheld, and film scanners. Windows driver support is provided by WIA. WIA is both an application programming interface (API) and a device driver interface (DDI).

Windows Imaging Component (WIC). WIC provides an extensible framework for working with images and image metadata. Software and hardware vendors can use WIC to develop codecs so that their own image formats can obtain the same platform support as native image formats, such as tagged image file format (TIFF), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), or Windows Media Photo.