How do I capture images in OpenCV and saving in pgm format?

Question

I am brand new to programming in general, and am working on a project for which I need to capture images from my webcam (possibly using OpenCV), and save the images as pgm f

Answer 1

First of all, please use newer site - opencv.org. Using outdated references leads to chain effect, when new users see old references, read old docs and post old links again.

There's actually no reason to use old C API. Instead, you can use newer C++ interface, which, among other things, handles capturing video gracefully. Here's shortened version of example from docs on VideoCapture:

#include "opencv2/opencv.hpp"

using namespace cv;

int main(int, char**)
{
    VideoCapture cap(0); // open the default camera
    if(!cap.isOpened())  // check if we succeeded
        return -1;

    for(;;)
    {
        Mat frame;
        cap >> frame; // get a new frame from camera
        // do any processing
        imwrite("path/to/image.png", frame);
        if(waitKey(30) >= 0) break;   // you can increase delay to 2 seconds here
    }
    // the camera will be deinitialized automatically in VideoCapture destructor
    return 0;
}

Also, if you are new to programming, consider using Python interface to OpenCV - cv2 module. Python is often considered simpler than C++, and using it you can play around with OpenCV functions right in an interactive console. Capturing video with cv2 looks something like this (adopted code from here):

import numpy as np
import cv2

cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0)

while(True):
    # Capture frame-by-frame
    ret, frame = cap.read()
    # do what you want with frame
    #  and then save to file
    cv2.imwrite('path/to/image.png', frame)
    if cv2.waitKey(30) & 0xFF == ord('q'): # you can increase delay to 2 seconds here
        break

# When everything done, release the capture
cap.release()
cv2.destroyAllWindows()