I'm very much a beginner in electronics, so I apologize if the concepts I'm trying to understand are very basic. I've been looking into making a simple camera setup with my Arduino and an Adafruit product linked here. From looking at this article, It seems that for a simple setup to work, this would require connecting to a Raspberry Pi at least, due to its requirement for a camera module:
The Raspberry Pi camera board transfers data through an extremely fast camera serial interface (CSI-2) bus directly to the system-on-chip (SoC) processor. It does this through a 15-pin ribbon cable, also known as flexible flat cable (FFC), and connects to the surface mount ZIF 15 socket in the Raspberry Pi board. As you may noted, the camera module on this official Raspberry Pi camera board is identical to the camera modules (ccd imagers) found in many mobile phones.
I'm having trouble understanding this as a concept for a couple reasons.
Why does a camera, which presumably has a set amount of pins that give video output, require a camera module to "process" its data before sending it into the rpi?
a. How is the raw input of a camera such as in the Adafruit product formatted?
b. How is the "processed" input of the camera board formatted?
(more dumb question) Assuming there's around 1920x1080 pixels for a video that the camera can take, how is this compressed into the <20 number of pinouts that comes out of the cable?
As I understand it from my limited experience with circuit diagramming, the little markers are inputs and triangles are ground, but what are the rest signifying (do lines like CAM1_DN0 signify inputs?
How could a circuit be designed to read in pixels of a camera and do high-level processing?
Again, apologies if these questions are really basic, but I couldn't seem to find any way of understanding this in a very detailed format online. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for reading!