Download code from GitHub
Handling Files, Cameras, and GUIs
Installing OpenCV and running samples is fun, but at this stage, we want to try things out in our own way. This chapter introduces OpenCV's I/O functionality. We also discuss the concept of a project and the beginnings of an object-oriented design for this project, which we will flesh out in subsequent chapters.
By starting with a look at I/O capabilities and design patterns, we will build our project in the same way we would make a sandwich: from the outside in. Bread slices and spread, or endpoints and glue, come before fillings or algorithms. We choose this approach because computer vision is mostly extroverted—it contemplates the real world outside our computer—and we want to apply all of our subsequent algorithmic work to the real world through a common interface.
Specifically, in this chapter, our code samples and discussions...
Technical requirements
This chapter uses Python, OpenCV, and NumPy. Please refer back to Chapter 1, Setting Up OpenCV, for installation instructions.
The complete code for this chapter can be found in this book's GitHub
repository, https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learning-OpenCV-4-Computer-Vision-with-Python-Third-Edition, in the Chapter02 folder.
Basic I/O scripts
Most CV applications need to get images as input. Most also produce images as output. An interactive CV application might require a camera as an input source and a window as an output destination. However, other possible sources and destinations include image files, video files, and raw bytes. For example, raw bytes might be transmitted via a network connection, or they might be generated by an algorithm if we incorporate procedural graphics into our application. Let's look at each of these possibilities.
Reading/writing an image file
OpenCV provides the imread function to load an image from a file and the imwrite function to write an image to a file. These functions support various file formats for...
Project Cameo (face tracking and image manipulation)
OpenCV is often studied through a cookbook approach that covers a lot of algorithms, but nothing about high-level application development. To an extent, this approach is understandable because OpenCV's potential applications are so diverse. OpenCV is used in a wide variety of applications, such as photo/video editors, motion-controlled games, a robot's AI, or psychology experiments where we log participants' eye movements. Across these varied use cases, can we truly study a useful set of abstractions?
The book's authors believe we can, and the sooner we start creating abstractions, the better. We will structure many of our OpenCV examples around a single application, but, at each step, we will design a component of this application to be extensible and reusable.
We will develop an interactive application...
Cameo – an object-oriented design
Python applications can be written in a purely procedural style. This is often done with small applications, such as our basic I/O scripts, discussed previously. However, from now on, we will often use an object-oriented style because it promotes modularity and extensibility.
From our overview of OpenCV's I/O functionality, we know that all images are similar, regardless of their source or destination. No matter how we obtain a stream of images or where we send it as output, we can apply the same application-specific logic to each frame in this stream. Separation of I/O code and application code becomes especially convenient in an application, such as Cameo, which uses multiple I/O streams.
We will create classes called CaptureManager and WindowManager as high-level interfaces to I/O streams. Our application code may use CaptureManager...
Summary
By now, we should have an application that displays a camera feed, listens for keyboard input, and (on command) records a screenshot or screencast. We are ready to extend the application by inserting some image-filtering code (Chapter 3, Processing Images with OpenCV) between the start and end of each frame. Optionally, we are also ready to integrate other camera drivers or application frameworks besides the ones supported by OpenCV.
We also possess the knowledge to manipulate images as NumPy arrays. This forms the perfect foundation for our next topic, filtering images.
