SANE ("Scanner Access Now Easy") is a universal scanner interface.
The value of such a universal interface is that it allows writing
just one driver per image acquisition device rather than one driver
for each device and application. So, if you have three applications
and four devices, traditionally you'd have had to write 12 different
programs.  With SANE, this number is reduced to seven: the three
applications plus the four drivers. Of course, the savings get even
bigger as more and more drivers and/or applications are added.

sane-frontends contains frontends to SANE including xscanimage and
xcam. Xscanimage is a GTK-based application for scanning images that
can also be used as a GIMP-plugin, and Xcam is used to get images
from cameras supported by SANE.

WWW: http://www.sane-project.org/