OpenCV: Brief note on how you can access webcam in Google colab!
2 min readMay 20, 2020
Working in Google Colab with free GPU is the smartest option that a beginner can get. But it becomes headache when you are working with OpenCV.
Basically Google Colab is cloud service, and you can’t access your local hardware like webcam. But it is possible by running some Javascript code given by Google Colab, but it only captures photo not video.
So i have grabbed some code from this article and some my code, to access webcam.
Step 0: Open Google Colab.
Step 1: Make Directory where all our captured videos will be stored.
Clone Opencv repo where you can get haarcascade files.
!git clone https://github.com/opencv/opencv.git
!mkdir VideoStep 2: Import Javascript code to open webcam.
Step 3: Open captured video
videofile = get_video()with open(video_file_test, 'wb') as f:
f.write(videofile)
Step 4: Some OpenCV code
If you want to view entire video you can remove count from while loop.
Step 5: And you are all done:
Disadvantage: Using this method, the video will be shown as png format, means frame by frame. But you know what it works.
You can find the working Github repo here.
