bad quality, when rendering images from camera in qt4 - c++

Question

My code:
camera = new RaspiCam_Cv();//raspbery pi library
camera->set(CV_CAP_PROP_FORMAT,CV_8UC1); //this is monochrome 8 bit format
camera->set(CV_CAP_PROP_FRAME_WIDTH, 960);
camera->set(CV_CAP_PROP_FRAME_HEIGHT,720);
while (1){
camera->grab();//for linux
unsigned char* buff = camera->getImageBufferData();
QPixmap pic = QPixmap::fromImage(QImage( buff, camWidth_, camHeight_, camWidth_ * 1, QImage::Format_Indexed8 ));
label->setPixmap(pic);
}
The problem is bad quality! I found out that the problem happens when using QImage, when using openCv Mat, everything is good!
Same thing happens in other Qt based programs, like this one (same bad quality): https://code.google.com/p/qt-opencv-multithreaded/
Here is a pic, where the problem is shown. there is a white page in front of the camera, so if all went as it should, you should see clean gray image.

Answer 1

You are resizing the image using pixmap and label transformations, which are worse than the one of QImage. This is due to pixmap being optimized for display and not for anything else. The pixmap size should be the same of the label to avoid any further resizing.
QImage img =QImage(
buff,
camWidth_,
camHeight_,
camWidth_ * 1,
QImage::Format_Indexed8 ).scaled(label->size());
label->setPixmap(QPixmap::fromImage(img));

Answer 2

This is not an answer, but it's too hard to share code in the comments.
Can you please test this code and tell me whether the result is good or bad?
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
RaspiCam_Cv *camera = new RaspiCam_Cv();
camera->set(CV_CAP_PROP_FORMAT , CV_8UC1) ;
camera->set(CV_CAP_PROP_FRAME_WIDTH, 960);
camera->set(CV_CAP_PROP_FRAME_HEIGHT,720);
namedWindow("Output",CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE);
while (1)
{
Mat frame;
camera.grab();
//camera.retrieve ( frame);
unsigned char* buff = camera->getImageBufferData();
frame = cv::Mat(720, 960, CV_8UC1, buff);
imshow("Output", frame);
if (waitKey(30) == 27)
{ cout << "Exit" << endl; break; }
}
camera->~RaspiCam_Cv();
return 0;
}

Answer 3

Your provided images look like the color depth is only 16 Bit.
For comparison, here's the provided captured image:
and here's the same image, transformed to 16 bit color space in IrfanView (without Floyd-Steinberg-Dithering).
In the comments we found out that the Raspberry Pi Output Buffer was set to 16 Bit. and setting it to 24 Bit helped.
But I can't explain why rendering the image on the pi with OpenCV's cv::imshow produced well looking images on the Monitor/TV...