OpenCV Seting and working with a camera

Oct 29, 2008 by damiles    55 Comments    Posted under: OpenCV, Tutorials

Working in opencv with cameras is very easy, we only need a camera and our opencv libraries.

The structure that we store the camera link is CvCapture, here we store this link, then to get this link we need call to cvCaptureFromCAM function, this function need only one param, the index of the camera to be used. If there is only one camera or it does not matter what camera to use -1 may be passed.

Then this is our basic line to retrive our camera link

CvCapture* capture = cvCaptureFromCAM( 0 );

Then we only need get each frame we can capture with cam, to do this we can use the cvQuetyFrame passing as param our camera link and it return a IplImage* struct that we can show.

IplImage* frame = cvQueryFrame( capture );

With this easy lines we can get all frames we need from our camera.

Demo source

Tags: Camera, OpenCV

55 Comments + Add Comment

• OpenCV - Pixel format of incoming image is unsupported by OpenCV April 1, 2011 at 7:32 pm

  [...] was get an error same like U, then I try dan_s's suggestion at http://blog.damiles.com/?p=61. [...]
• 
  Supervan May 2, 2011 at 12:14 pm

  I’m using windows 7 with visual studio 2010.
  The Microsoft lifecam vx-7000 is working under windows.

  I’m using your standard code without any modifications.

  Getting this error “Cant set width property”
  The life video is displaying on the screen and no frames get captured.

  Please help
• 
  damiles May 2, 2011 at 12:51 pm

  If you see on CamShiftFrame window the video, there are no problems, only that your camera has no support for set porperties from opencv. But you can retrieve the frames and work with its, but can’t change the camera resolution for example.

  Regards.
• 
  jason September 29, 2011 at 4:47 pm

  Hi damiles
  I’m using OpenCV2.3 at ubuntu11.04
  But the camera fails to open when I try both my code and yours.

  The camera works well on cheese.
  I also install the v4lucp
  The /usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so is also exist!
  What should I try now? Please any suggestion would be appreciated!
• 
  jason September 29, 2011 at 5:03 pm

  I got this. But I don’t know how to do.
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5974882/opencv-2-2-ubuntu11-04-webcam-not-detected-solved