How to find contours from a webcam frame using opencv and c++? - c++

Question

My goal is to find contours by capturing frame from a webcam. I was able to do it with static images but then I tried to use the same concept in a webcam frame and its giving me this error:
"OpenCV Error: Assertion failed (mtype == type0 || (CV_MAT_CN(mtype) == CV_MAT_CN
(type0) && ((1 << type0) & fixedDepthMask) != 0)) in cv::_OutputArray::create, f
ile C:\builds\2_4_PackSlave-win64-vc11-shared\opencv\modules\core\src\matrix.cpp
, line 1486"
This is the code that I used to find the contours in my program;
Rng rng(12345);
Mat captureframe,con,threshold_output;
vector<vector<Point> > contours; //
vector<Vec4i> hierarchy;
while(true)
{
capturedevice>>captureframe;
con = captureframe.clone();
cvtColor(captureframe,con,CV_BGR2GRAY);
threshold( con, threshold_output, thresh, 255, THRESH_BINARY );
findContours( threshold_output, contours, hierarchy, CV_RETR_TREE, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE, Point(0, 0) );
Mat drawing = Mat::zeros( threshold_output.size(), CV_8UC3 );
for( int i = 0; i< contours.size(); i++ )
{
Scalar color = Scalar( rng.uniform(0, 255), rng.uniform(0,255), rng.uniform(0,255) );
drawContours( drawing, contours, i, color, 1, 8, vector<Vec4i>(), 0, Point() );
}
imshow("contour drawing",drawing);
}

Answer 1

I think that the problem is in the following two lines:
con = captureframe.clone();
cvtColor(captureframe,con,CV_BGR2GRAY);
In the first line, you are making con as a clone of captureFrame which means that con is a 3 channel image and in the Second line you are trying to make con a grayScale image which is 1 channel therefore you are getting the fault related to the image type.
You should try to do the following (i am not sure whether your code would run after this or not but you should not get the current error after this):
con.create(captureframe.rows , captureframe.cols, CV_8UC1);
cvtColor(captureframe,con,CV_BGR2GRAY);

Answer 2

Guys thank you so much for your help. I finally figured out my mistake and there was a problem in my declaration. I was looking online for some references and then i stumbled upon this code for object detection. The guy actually declared "contour" like this - "std::vector < std::vector < cv::Point > >contours; " and my declaration was "vector contours". My declaration worked for static images but it gave me this error while finding contours from webcam. Can anyone explain me the difference between the above two declarations? Also, as suggested by skm i converted my frame capture to a 1 channel depth image by using the con.create(frame.rows,frame.cols,cv_8uc1) and then converting it to grayscale image. This step is really crucial. So, here is my complete working code!! Thanks
VideoCapture capturedevice;
capturedevice.open(0);
Mat frame,con;
Mat grayframe;
std::vector < std::vector < cv::Point > >contours; //this is very important decalartion
while(true)
{
capturedevice>>frame;
con.create(frame.rows,frame.cols,CV_8UC1);
cvtColor(frame,con,CV_BGR2GRAY);
cv::findContours (con, contours, CV_RETR_EXTERNAL, CV_CHAIN_APPROX_NONE);
cv::drawContours (frame, contours, -1, cv::Scalar (0, 0, 255), 2);
imshow("frame", frame);
waitKey(33);
}