Can I access the raw camera images? What is the format and compression for accessing the raw camera images?

Yes, raw images can be accessed. They are streamed from the camera as uncompressed 8-bit images.  This results in a stream of (height x width) uint8_t numbers.  These can be accessed either with our open-sourced library, libMultiSense, or using our ROS wrapper for libMultiSense, instructions here.