camera

Information

Package	camera
Description	Just a dead simple package to create readable streams from connected webcams
Node Version	>=12

Install

You'll need OpenCV 4 or newer installed before installing.

You may need to export OPENCV4NODEJS_DISABLE_AUTOBUILD=1 before running npm install.

Specific for macOS

Install OpenCV using brew

brew update
brew install opencv@4
brew link --force opencv@4

Usage

createStream([idx])

• The object returned from createStream is a full readable Stream - you can pause, resume, destroy, pipe, etc.
• createStream optionally takes a camera number and defaults to 0 for the primary camera.
• Each data event is a full image buffer from the camera.
• Image buffers are PNGs.
• To convert the buffer to a base64 data uri (for the browser) just do data:image/png;base64,${buffer.toString('base64')}

const camera = require('camera')

const webcam = camera.createStream()

webcam.on('data', (buffer) => {
  // do something with image buffer
})

snapshot(cb)

Returns an error and one image buffer to the given callback. Useful if you just want to grab a simple photo.

record(milliseconds, cb)

Returns an array of video frames for the time-span specified in milliseconds.

Examples

Take a picture

const fs = require('fs')
const camera = require('camera')

const webcam = camera.createStream()

webcam.on('error', (err) => {
  console.log('error reading data', err)
})

webcam.on('data', (buffer) => {
  fs.writeFileSync('cam.png', buffer)
  webcam.destroy()
})

webcam.snapshot((err, buffer) => {
  
})

webcam.record(1000, (buffers) => {
  
})