Streaming OpenCV Video over the Network Using M-JPEG

OpenCV has no support for streaming videos, so everyone has its own recipe for doing it, you can design your own server/client combo or use a third party library such as libvlc or ffmpeg. Both options seemed like an overkill because I only wanted to see what the system sees for debugging purposes so I ended up settling on a simpler system and put together a crude Motion-JPEG streamer.

M-JPEG over HTTP is really simple to implement, you basically inform the client using a special mime-type content type multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary= informs, that you will be sending a series of JPEGs separated by the boundary. As long as the client keeps the connection open we keep sending images.

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: mjpeg-streamer
Content-Type: multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=informs
--informs

--informs
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 67856

<binary JPEG image data>
--informs
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 52856

<binary JPEG Image data>
--informs 
...

(ns mjpeg
  (:import (javax.imageio ImageIO IIOImage)
	   (java.io ByteArrayOutputStream)
	   (javax.imageio.plugins.jpeg JPEGImageWriteParam)))

(defn- send-ok-response [out]
  (.write out (.getBytes
	       (str "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n"
		    "Server: mjpeg-streamer\r\n"
		    "Content-Type: multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=informs\r\n"
		    "--informs\r\n"))))

(defn- send-separator [out]
  (.write out (.getBytes (str "\r\n"
			      "--informs\r\n"))))

(defn- image-to-array [f compression]
  (let [image-writer (.next (ImageIO/getImageWritersByFormatName "jpg"))
	jpeg-params (doto (.getDefaultWriteParam image-writer)
		      (.setCompressionMode JPEGImageWriteParam/MODE_EXPLICIT)
		      (.setCompressionQuality compression))
	byte-stream (ByteArrayOutputStream.)]
    (.setOutput image-writer (ImageIO/createImageOutputStream byte-stream))
    (.write image-writer nil (IIOImage. (f) nil nil) jpeg-params)
    (.dispose image-writer)
    (.toByteArray byte-stream)))

(defn- send-image [f compression out]
  (let [bytes (image-to-array f compression)
	size (count bytes)]
    (.write out (.getBytes (str "Content-Type: image/jpeg\r\n"
				"Content-Length: " size "\r\n\r\n")))
    (.write out bytes)))

(defn mjpeg-streamer [f compression in out]
  (send-ok-response out)
  (while true
    (send-separator out)
    (send-image f compression out)))

mjpeg-streamer takes a function f which should return a new BufferedImage every time it is called, a float compression value, 1.0 meaning highest quality 0.0 meaning lowest quality and input/output streams from the socket, it will start pumping images through the stream until the client closes the connection.

(use 'vision.core)
(use 'clojure.contrib.server-socket)

(def *camera* (capture-from-cam 0))
(create-server 8080
	       (fn [in out]
		 (mjpeg-streamer
		  #(deref (:buffered-image (query-frame *camera*))) 1.0 in out)))

The advantage of using this scheme is that basically all major browsers and smart phones will be able to view the feed (I've used this with Chrome, Safari and Safari on the iPhone), on the other hand the disadvantages are it will use more bandwidth and not all clients will be viewing the feed at the same rate, Safari was getting the feed at around 20 FPS where as Chrome can't pass 10 FPS.