How to read mp4 video to be processed by scikit-image?

Question

I would like to apply a scikit-image function (specifically the template matching function match_template) to the frames of a mp4 vide

Answer 1

You could use scikit-video, like this:

from skvideo.io import VideoCapture

cap = VideoCapture(filename)
cap.open()

while True:
    retval, image = cap.read()
    # image is a numpy array containing the next frame
    # do something with image here
    if not retval:
        break

This uses avconv or ffmpeg under the hood. The performance is quite good, with a small overhead to move the data into python compared to just decoding the video in avconv.

The advantage of scikit-video is that the API is exactly the same as the video reading/writing API of OpenCV; just replace cv2.VideoCapture with skvideo.io.VideoCapture.