Getting current frame with OpenCV VideoCapture in Python

Question

I am using cv2.VideoCapture to read the frames of an RTSP video link in a python script. The .read() function is in a while loop which runs once every second, However, I do not get the most current frame from the stream. I get older frames and in this way my lag builds up. Is there anyway that I can get the most current frame and not older frames which have piped into the VideoCapture object?

Answer 1

I also faced the same problem. Seems that once the VideoCapture object is initialized it keeps storing the frames in some buffer of sort and returns a frame from that for every read operation. What I did is I initialized the VideoCapture object every time I wanted to read a frame and then released the stream. Following code captures 10 images at an interval of 10 seconds and stores them. Same can be done using while(True) in a loop.

for x in range(0,10):
    cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0)
    ret, frame = cap.read()
    cv2.imwrite('test'+str(x)+'.png',frame)
    cap.release()
    time.sleep(10)

Answer 2

I've encountered the same problem and found a git repository of Azure samples for their computer vision service. The relevant part is the Camera Capture module, specifically the Video Stream class.

You can see they've implemented a Queue that is being updated to keep only the latest frame:

def update(self):
    try:
        while True:
            if self.stopped:
                return

            if not self.Q.full():
                (grabbed, frame) = self.stream.read()

                # if the `grabbed` boolean is `False`, then we have
                # reached the end of the video file
                if not grabbed:
                    self.stop()
                    return

                self.Q.put(frame)

                # Clean the queue to keep only the latest frame
                while self.Q.qsize() > 1:
                    self.Q.get()