Dennis Núñez

PhD (c) in AI and Neuroimaging. CEA / Inria / Université Paris-Saclay


Accessing to Raspberry Pi camera with Python 2.7 and OpenCV 2

Once installed Python 2.7 and Opencv 2, now we can finally start writing some code!.


Connect to RPI with SSH and Xephyr

First, on Ubuntu:

$ Xephyr -ac -br -keybd ephyr,,,xkbmodel=pc105,xkblayout=es -noreset -screen 1280x720 :1

Then, on RPI:

$ DISPLAY=:1 ssh -Y pi@10.42.0.246 $ startlxde


Accessing a single image of your Raspberry Pi using Python and OpenCV

Open up a new file, name it test_image.py, and insert the following code:

# import the necessary packages from picamera.array import PiRGBArray from picamera import PiCamera import time import cv2 # initialize the camera and grab a reference to the raw camera capture camera = PiCamera() rawCapture = PiRGBArray(camera) # allow the camera to warmup time.sleep(0.1) # grab an image from the camera camera.capture(rawCapture, format="bgr") image = rawCapture.array # display the image on screen and wait for a keypress cv2.imshow("Image", image) cv2.waitKey(0)

We’ll start by importing our necessary packages on Lines 2-5.

From there, we initialize our PiCamera object on Line 8 and grab a reference to the raw capture component on Line 9. This rawCapture object is especially useful since it (1) gives us direct access to the camera stream and (2) avoids the expensive compression to JPEG format, which we would then have to take and decode to OpenCV format anyway. I highly recommend that you use PiRGBArray whenever you need to access the Raspberry Pi camera — the performance gains are well worth it.

From there, we sleep for a tenth of a second on Line 12 — this allows the camera sensor to warm up.

Finally, we grab the actual photo from the rawCapture object on Line 15 where we take special care to ensure our image is in BGR format rather than RGB. OpenCV represents images as NumPy arrays in BGR order rather than RGB — this little nuisance is subtle, but very important to remember as it can lead to some confusing bugs in your code down the line.

Finally, we display our image to screen on Lines 19 and 20.

To execute this example, open up a terminal, navigate to your test_image.py file, and issue the following command:

$ python test_image.py

If all goes as expected you should have an image displayed on your screen.


Accessing the video stream of your Raspberry Pi using Python and OpenCV

Alright, so we’ve learned how to grab a single image from the Raspberry Pi camera. But what about a video stream?.

You might guess that we are going to use the cv2.VideoCapture function here — but I actually recommend against this. Getting cv2.VideoCapture to play nice with your Raspberry Pi is not a nice experience (you’ll need to install extra drivers) and something you should generally avoid.

And besides, why would we use the cv2.VideoCapture function when we can easily access the raw video stream using the picamera module?.

Let’s go ahead and take a look on how we can access the video stream. Open up a new file, name it test_video.py, and insert the following code:

# import the necessary packages from picamera.array import PiRGBArray from picamera import PiCamera import time import cv2 # initialize the camera and grab a reference to the raw camera capture camera = PiCamera() camera.resolution = (640, 480) camera.framerate = 32 rawCapture = PiRGBArray(camera, size=(640, 480)) # allow the camera to warmup time.sleep(0.1) # capture frames from the camera for frame in camera.capture_continuous(rawCapture, format="bgr", use_video_port=True): # grab the raw NumPy array representing the image, then initialize the timestamp # and occupied/unoccupied text image = frame.array # show the frame cv2.imshow("Frame", image) key = cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF # clear the stream in preparation for the next frame rawCapture.truncate(0) # if the `q` key was pressed, break from the loop if key == ord("q"): break

This example starts off similarly to the previous one. We start off by importing our necessary packages on Lines 2-5.

And from there we construct our camera object on Line 8 which allows us to interface with the Raspberry Pi camera. However, we also take the time to set the resolution of our camera (640 x 480 pixels) on Line 9 and the frame rate (i.e. frames per second, or simply FPS) on Line 10. We also initialize our PiRGBArray object on Line 11, but we also take care to specify the same resolution as on Line 9.

Accessing the actual video stream is handled on Line 17 by making a call to the capture_continuous method of our camera object.

This method returns a frame from the video stream. The frame then has an array property, which corresponds to the frame in NumPy array format — all the hard work is done for us on Lines 17 and 20!.

We then take the frame of the video and display on screen on Lines 23 and 24.

An important line to pay attention to is Line 27: You must clear the current frame before you move on to the next one!.

If you fail to clear the frame, your Python script will throw an error — so be sure to pay close attention to this when implementing your own applications!.

Finally, if the user presses the q key, we break form the loop and exit the program.

To execute our script, just open a terminal (making sure you are in the cv virtual environment, of course) and issue the following command:

$ python test_video.py

If all goes as expected you should have a video stream displayed on your screen.


Resources

- https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/03/30/accessing-the-raspberry-pi-camera-with-opencv-and-python/.