I've been searching cameras to use on a the Arduino DUE for an Arduino-based space mission at my school's satellite lab. The better cameras including FLIR camera sensors don't seem to have much support for the Arduino as many struggle with getting them to work, yet appear successful throughout countless examples on the Raspberry pi's. Is there a reason for this?
All I can think of is that since the Arduino DUE uses an Arm Cortex M, less software development has been accomplished as most Arduinos don't use Arm processors while raspberry pi's have had much more support for their Arm Cortex A's. What can it be? I see the Arduino Portenta H7 has a specified camera interface which I have yet to look into..
A big part of why cameras are not supported on arduinos, but are on the pi is simply that the amount of data involved in a picture with a "modern" resolution is too much to comfortably handle on the arduino boards due to the limited flash and ram available on a microcontroller. You have a board with a few dozen kb of ram. How big is the image data for a single image? And if you want to do video? Dream on!
Cameras and image processing are much better suited for an SBC like the pi, which has oodles of ram and processing power - the pi is of course less suited to interfacing with more basic hardware for a variety of reasons, but it is much more suitable for large volumes of data.
As always, there's a tradeoff between low level functionality of a small microcontroller, where you have full control of everything at a very basic level, no OS running behind the scenes to screw up timing, etc vs an SBC where you're running an OS, multiple applications, tons of processing power.