Using OpenCV Output as Webcam

Question

So, I want to write a program to make the processed output from OpenCV be seen as a WebCam. I want to use it to create effects for a program like Skype. I am stuck and Googl

Answer 1

I had the same problem: My grandmother hears poorly so I wanted to be able to add subtitles to my Skype video feed. I also wanted to add some effects for laughs. I could not get webcamoid working. Screen capture method (mentioned above) seemed too hacky, and I could not get Skype to detect ffmpegs dummy output camera (guvcview detects though). Then I ran across this:

https://github.com/jremmons/pyfakewebcam

It is not C++ but Python. Still, it is fast enough on my non-fancy laptop. It can create multiple dummy webcams (I only need two). It works with Python3 as well. The steps mentioned in readme were easy to reproduce on Ubuntu 18.04. Within 2-3 minutes, the example code was running. At the time of this writing, the given examples there do not use input from a real webcam. So I add my code, which processes the real webcam's input and outputs it to two dummy cameras:

import cv2
import time
import pyfakewebcam
import numpy as np

IMG_W = 1280
IMG_H = 720

cam = cv2.VideoCapture(0)
cam.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_WIDTH, IMG_W)
cam.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_HEIGHT, IMG_H)

fake1 = pyfakewebcam.FakeWebcam('/dev/video1', IMG_W, IMG_H)
fake2 = pyfakewebcam.FakeWebcam('/dev/video2', IMG_W, IMG_H)

while True:
    ret, frame = cam.read()

    flipped = cv2.flip(frame, 1)

    # Mirror effect 
    frame[0 : IMG_H, IMG_W//2 : IMG_W] = flipped[0 : IMG_H, IMG_W//2 : IMG_W]

    fake1.schedule_frame(frame)
    fake2.schedule_frame(flipped)

    time.sleep(1/15.0)