How to get camera screen in android? - android

In my android app, I am trying to do some image recognition, and I want to open the camera and see the camera generated images before even taking a pic, like the camera browse mode.
Basically as you browse I want to continuously grab the current screen and then read it and generate some object to update some text on the screen. Something like this
#Override
// this gets called every 5 seconds while in camera browse mode. bitmap is the image of the camera currently
public void getScreen(Bitmap bitmap) {
MyData data = myalgorithm(bitmap);
displayCountOnScreen(data);
}
I saw this app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fingersoft.cartooncamera&hl=en
and in camera browse mode, they change the screen and put some other GUI stuff on the screen. I want to do that too.
Anyone know how I can do this?
Thanks

If all you want to do is put some GUI elements on the screen, then there is no need to fetch all the preview frames as Bitmaps (though you could do that as well, if you want):
Create a layout with a SurfaceView for where you want the video data to appear, and then put other views on top.
In onCreate, you can get it like this:
surfaceView = (SurfaceView)findViewById(R.id.cameraSurfaceView);
surfaceHolder = surfaceView.getHolder();
surfaceHolder.addCallback(this); // For when you need to know when it changes.
surfaceHolder.setType(SurfaceHolder.SURFACE_TYPE_PUSH_BUFFERS);
When you create a camera, you need to pass it a Surface to display the preview on, see:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/Camera.html#setPreviewDisplay(android.view.SurfaceHolder):
Camera camera = ...
...
camera.setPreviewDisplay(surfaceHolder);
camera.startPreview();
If you want to do image recognition, what you want are the raw image bytes to work with. In this case, register a PreviewCallback, see here:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/Camera.html#setPreviewCallbackWithBuffer(android.hardware.Camera.PreviewCallback)

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How to disable/modify AutoFocus and AutoWhiteBalance on Android Camera using OpenCV

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I need to turn the "AUTO FOCUS" off because in my case the more blurred image input I have, the better, and I also need to turn the AutoWhiteBalance off as well, or maybe set to a different value.
I would like to know how to do it through my OpenCV CameraBridgeViewBase so I could modify the camera's Focus/WhiteBalance settings.
I've trying to find a way to solve it, and I noticed that many people face the same problems.
Here, at Stack Overflow, would be a great place to find someone who have worked with that and found a good way to overcome these problems.
create your own subclass of javacameraview
public class MyJavaCameraView extends JavaCameraView {
where you can have access to mCamera;
add whatever camera access using method you are interested in
for example
// Setup the camera
public void setFlashMode(boolean flashLightON) {
Camera camera = mCamera;
if (camera != null) {
Camera.Parameters params = camera.getParameters();
params.setFlashMode(Camera.Parameters.FLASH_MODE_TORCH);
camera.setParameters(params);
and use this new class as part of the main activity
//force java camera
mOpenCvCameraView = (MyJavaCameraView) findViewById(R.id.activity_surface_view);
mOpenCvCameraView.setVisibility(SurfaceView.VISIBLE);
mOpenCvCameraView.setCvCameraViewListener(this);
mOpenCvCameraView.enableView();

How can Android service take photos

Can I take a picture from an IntentService in Android without displaying a preview surface to the user?
I have tried:
SurfaceView view = new SurfaceView(this);
c.setPreviewDisplay(view.getHolder());
c.startPreview();
c.takePicture(shutterCallback, rawPictureCallback, jpegPictureCallback);
But it doesn't work on my phone, Galaxy S2X
You can record video without live preview, see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/14997460/192373. You can force this recording to contain one frame if you wish. You can not capture a still photo without a View. Note that on some devices this restriction is not enforced, and in any case there are write a few known workarounds that make the live preview invisible to the end-user. Here you can find an answer how you can create a view from a background service.

Android filtered video from camera

I can't understand how to display filtered video from camera on Android correctly...
I wrote for sdk-8, so I've used the scheme below:
Camera.setPreviewDisplay(null); // use null surface holder to identify the fact that I don't want to see raw camera preview.
Camera.setPreviewCallbackWithBuffer() + Camera.addCallbackBuffer() // to get camera data, modify it and draw on my GLSurfaceView
And this scheme is wonderful works on 2.2.* androids... and I had been happy, until didn't try application on 4.* =) my callback function for receive frame data doesn't called at all!
According documentation, I shouldn't use null as argument for setPreviewDisplay... without surface instance, video stream will not run... but if I give him surface he will start drawing camera raw preview on that surface....
The question is: How can I correctly draw filtered camera video by my self?!

Android image processing get image data quick

I am creating an Android app to do some image processing techniques with the camera and it needs to be fast. This is the pseudo-code of how the entire system works:
1. loop while not finished
1.1 get image frame
1.2 process image for object detection
2. end loop
I actually have questions on the basics of the Camera class:
Is previewing the perceived image from the camera faster than no previews at all? The former means using SurfaceView to preview the image.
Let's say from the takePicture() method, can the image data array be obtained without the previews?
My real question is, what is the best way to obtain the image data (say, byte[] array) quickly and iteratively after processing the image (as stated on top)?
I planned to use takePicture() method to get the image data, but I need your opinion if this is the only way or if there other better ways.
You can setup a SurfaceView as the Camera's preview display and get the data of every preview frame using the PreviewCallback. This would be better than using takePicture if you don't need the high resolution that takePicture captures. In other words, if you want to capture images of lower quality at a faster rate, use PreviewCallback... if you want to capture images of higher quality at a very slow rate, use takePicture.
As for your questions, I don't think you can take pictures without using a preview display, but i could be wrong.
class MainActivity extends Activity implements Camera.PreviewCallback, SurfaceHolder.Callback {
...
public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
camera = Camera.open();
camera.setPreviewCallback(this);
...
}
public void onPreviewFrame(byte[] data, Camera camera) {
// image data contained in data... do as you wish
}
}

SurfaceView getting black when calling Camera.stopPreview()

I am doing some image processing of previews captured by the camera. It is cpu consuming task and I have to stop preview to make it faster. Before new frame is being processed I am calling Camera.stopPreview() and after Camera.startPreview().
However, I would like to have last captured frame displayed on SurfaceView after stopping the preview. It works 'out of the box' on 2.3 devices, however, SurfaceView gets black after calling Camera.stopPreview() on older versions of SDK. Does anyone know what has changed and what to do?
Yes, this was an improvement of the 2.3.
I had this problem in 2.2 as well, there was no way to work on a preview image despite the fact this was theoretically possible according to the API. To solve this I had to actually take a picture using Camera.takePicture(null, null, Camera.PictureCallback myCallback) (see info here) and then to implement a callback to handle the taken picture. The instance of the class that implements this callback is actually the parameter to pass to Camera.takePicture() and the callback method itself looks like this:
public void onPictureTaken(byte[] JPEGData, Camera camera) {
final Bitmap bitmap = createBitmapFromView(JPEGData);
// do something with the Bitmap
}
Doing that way prevents the picture to be saved on the external storage with the regular pictures taken with the camera application. Should you need to serialize the Bitmap you'll have to do it explicitely. But it doesn't prevent the camera's trigger sound from being emitted.
Camera.takePicture() has to be called wile the preview is running. stopPreview() can be called right after.
One thing to be careful with /!\:
Camera.takePicture() is not reentrant (at all). The callback must have returned before any subsequent call of Camera.takePicture(). This was freezing my phone, I had to shutdown and restart it before it to be usable again. As the action was triggered by a button, on my side, I had to shield it with a boolean:
if (!mPictureTaken) {
mPictureTaken = true; // absolutely NOT reentrant. Any double click sticks the phone otherwise.
mCameraView.takePicture(callback);
}

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