Python OpenCV streaming from camera – multithreading, timestamps

Using threading to handle I/O heavy operations (such as reading frames from a webcam) is a classic programming model. Since accessing the webcam/camera using cv2.VideoCapture().read() is a blocking operation, our main program is stalled until the frame is read from the camera device and returned to our script. Essentially the idea is to spawn another thread to handle grabbing the frames in parallel instead of relying on a single thread (our ‘main’ thread) to grab the frames in sequential order. This will allow frames to be continuously read from the I/O thread, while our root thread processes the current frame. Once the root thread finishes processing its frame, it simply needs to grab the current frame from the I/O thread without having to wait for blocking I/O operations.

Thus we can improve performance by creating a new thread that does nothing but poll for new frames while our main thread handles processing the current frame. For an implementation to handle multiple camera streams, take a look at capture multiple camera streams with OpenCV

from threading import Thread
import cv2, time

class VideoStreamWidget(object):
    def __init__(self, src=0):
        self.capture = cv2.VideoCapture(src)
        # Start the thread to read frames from the video stream
        self.thread = Thread(target=self.update, args=())
        self.thread.daemon = True
        self.thread.start()

    def update(self):
        # Read the next frame from the stream in a different thread
        while True:
            if self.capture.isOpened():
                (self.status, self.frame) = self.capture.read()
            time.sleep(.01)

    def show_frame(self):
        # Display frames in main program
        cv2.imshow('frame', self.frame)
        key = cv2.waitKey(1)
        if key == ord('q'):
            self.capture.release()
            cv2.destroyAllWindows()
            exit(1)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    video_stream_widget = VideoStreamWidget()
    while True:
        try:
            video_stream_widget.show_frame()
        except AttributeError:
            pass