How to access the Webcam in Windows 7

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I am trying to write a a simple program that converts video from my webcam into ASCII text, like an ASCII art video. I currently have Visual Studio 2008, and will soon upgrade to VS 2010. My machine is Windows 7, 64 bit. My question is, which SDK can I use which will allow me to take frames from my webcam, process the frames, and then display them in a window. I know that if I would have asked this question in 2005, I would simply use avicap32.dll. As I understand it, though, this has been superceded by Microsoft Media Foundation. Extracting RGB data from a webcam frame and converting to text seems really difficult in Media Foundation. So my question is, what should I use? Should I try to go back and use the DirectShow libraries?

Thanks in advance!

Posted 7-Jul-10 6:37am

weylspinor

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helianthus87 · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-08T04:08:00

Solution 1

Try out OpenCV library which has very nice support for cameras and image processing at all and its for free ;)

I'm not sure whats the web of this projectbut here's link to OpenCV wiki. You can find anything you need there.

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

Posted 8-Jul-10 4:08am

helianthus87

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weylspinor 28-Aug-10 2:41am

Thanks for this! I ended up using it for my project. By the way, I'm new to this open stuff. Am I allowed to market my app without paying royalties to opencv if I use it? Thanks!

helianthus87 30-Aug-10 10:37am

According to BSD Licence you can use it to commercial solutions but in final product you need to attach information about opencv's authors and it's licence content. I'm not really familiar with licensing stuff at all. Thats all i found out about BSD Licence from wikipedia ;)