Python: Access camera WITHOUT OpenCV

Question

Comrades,

I'd like to capture images from the laptop camera in Python. Currently all signs point to OpenCV. Problem is OpenCV is a nightmare to install, and it's a nightmare that reoccurs every time you reinstall your code on a new system.

Is there a more lightweight way to capture camera data in Python? I'm looking for something to the effect of:

$ pip install something
$ python
>>> import something
>>> im = something.get_camera_image()

I'm on Mac, but solutions on any platform are welcome.

Answer 1

I've done this before using pygame. But I can't seem to find the script that I used... It seems there is a tutorial here which uses the native camera module and is not dependent on OpenCV.

Try this:

import pygame
import pygame.camera
from pygame.locals import *

pygame.init()
pygame.camera.init()

cam = pygame.camera.Camera("/path/to/camera",(640,480))
cam.start()

image = cam.get_image()

If you don't know the path to the camera you can also get a list of all available which should include you laptop webcam:

camlist = pygame.camera.list_cameras()
    if camlist:
        cam = pygame.camera.Camera(camlist[0],(640,480))

Answer 2

You can use pyavfcam github. You will need to install xcode and cython, first. This is the official demo.

import pyavfcam

# Open the default video source
cam = pyavfcam.AVFCam(sinks='image')
cam.snap_picture('test.jpg')

print "Saved test.jpg (Size: " + str(cam.shape[0]) + " x " + str(cam.shape[1]) + ")"

Answer 3

Videocapture for Windows

I've used videocapture in the past and it was perfect:

from VideoCapture import Device
cam = Device()
cam.saveSnapshot('image.jpg')

Answer 4

As the documentation states, currently pygame.camera only supports linux and v4l2 cameras, so this would not work on macOS. On Linux instead it works fine.