pygame.camera

pygame module for camera use

Pygame currently supports only Linux and v4l2 cameras.

EXPERIMENTAL!: This API may change or disappear in later pygame releases. If you use this, your code will very likely break with the next pygame release.

The Bayer to RGB function is based on:

Sonix SN9C101 based webcam basic I/F routines
Copyright (C) 2004 Takafumi Mizuno <[email protected]>
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New in pygame 1.9.0.

pygame.camera.colorspace(Surface, format, DestSurface = None) -> Surface

Surface colorspace conversion

Allows for conversion from "RGB" to a destination colorspace of "HSV" or "YUV". The source and destination surfaces must be the same size and pixel depth. This is useful for computer vision on devices with limited processing power. Capture as small of an image as possible, transform.scale() it even smaller, and then convert the colorspace to YUV or HSV before doing any processing on it.

pygame.camera.list_cameras() -> [cameras]

returns a list of available cameras

Checks the computer for available cameras and returns a list of strings of camera names, ready to be fed into pygame.camera.Camera.

pygame.camera.Camera

load a camera

Camera(device, (width, height), format) -> Camera

Loads a v4l2 camera. The device is typically something like "/dev/video0". Default width and height are 640 by 480. Format is the desired colorspace of the output. This is useful for computer vision purposes. The default is RGB. The following are supported:

• RGB - Red, Green, Blue
• YUV - Luma, Blue Chrominance, Red Chrominance
• HSV - Hue, Saturation, Value

start() -> None

opens, initializes, and starts capturing

Opens the camera device, attempts to initialize it, and begins recording images to a buffer. The camera must be started before any of the below functions can be used.

stop() -> None

stops, uninitializes, and closes the camera

Stops recording, uninitializes the camera, and closes it. Once a camera is stopped, the below functions cannot be used until it is started again.

get_controls() -> (hflip = bool, vflip = bool, brightness)

gets current values of user controls

If the camera supports it, get_controls will return the current settings for horizontal and vertical image flip as bools and brightness as an int. If unsupported, it will return the default values of (0, 0, 0). Note that the return values here may be different than those returned by set_controls, though these are more likely to be correct.

set_controls(hflip = bool, vflip = bool, brightness) -> (hflip = bool, vflip = bool, brightness)

changes camera settings if supported by the camera

Allows you to change camera settings if the camera supports it. The return values will be the input values if the camera claims it succeeded or the values previously in use if not. Each argument is optional, and the desired one can be chosen by supplying the keyword, like hflip. Note that the actual settings being used by the camera may not be the same as those returned by set_controls.

get_size() -> (width, height)

returns the dimensions of the images being recorded

Returns the current dimensions of the images being captured by the camera. This will return the actual size, which may be different than the one specified during initialization if the camera did not support that size.

query_image() -> bool

checks if a frame is ready

If an image is ready to get, it returns true. Otherwise it returns false. Note that some webcams will always return False and will only queue a frame when called with a blocking function like get_image(). This is useful to separate the framerate of the game from that of the camera without having to use threading.

get_image(Surface = None) -> Surface

captures an image as a Surface

Pulls an image off of the buffer as an RGB Surface. It can optionally reuse an existing Surface to save time. The bit-depth of the surface is either 24 bits or the same as the optionally supplied Surface.

get_raw() -> string

returns an unmodified image as a string

Gets an image from a camera as a string in the native pixelformat of the camera. Useful for integration with other libraries.