An image acquisition and display system based on S3C2440 and embedded Linux is designed. The image data is captured through USB camera, while the programming interfaces provided by the Video4Linux module are used to implement the image collection. Based on Qt/Embedded, the collected image is real-time displayed on LCD. Further, the images are compressed according to JPEG compression algorithm for subsequent process or transmission. The proposed system which is based on the embedded framework performs image data collection, real-time display and image compression. It can be widely used in the fields of intelligent transportation, computer vision and so on.