How can I read an image from an Internet URL in Python cv2, scikit image and mahotas?

Question

How can I read an image from an Internet URL in Python cv2?

This Stack Overflow answer,

import cv2.cv as cv import urllib2 from cStringIO import StringIO import PIL.Image as pil url="some_url"  img_file = urllib2.urlopen(url) im = StringIO(img_file.read()) 

is not good because Python reported to me:

TypeError: object.__new__(cStringIO.StringI) is not safe, use cStringIO.StringI.__new__ 

Answer 1

Since a cv2 image is not a string (save a Unicode one, yucc), but a NumPy array, - use cv2 and NumPy to achieve it:

import cv2 import urllib import numpy as np  req = urllib.urlopen('http://answers.opencv.org/upfiles/logo_2.png') arr = np.asarray(bytearray(req.read()), dtype=np.uint8) img = cv2.imdecode(arr, -1) # 'Load it as it is'  cv2.imshow('lalala', img) if cv2.waitKey() & 0xff == 27: quit() 

Answer 2

The following reads the image directly into a NumPy array:

from skimage import io  image = io.imread('https://raw2.github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image.github.com/master/_static/img/logo.png')