opencv.imshow will cause jupyter notebook crash

Question

I check other question on google or stackoverflow, they are talking about run cv2.imshow in script, but my code run in jupyter notebook.

Here is my configuration:

1. ubuntu 16.4x64

2. python 3.5

3. opencv 3.1.0

I start a jupyter notebook: here is the code I put it notebook:

%pylab notebook
import cv2

cvim2disp = cv2.imread('data/home.jpg')
cv2.imshow('HelloWorld', cvim2disp)
cv2.waitKey() #image will not show until this is called
cv2.destroyWindow('HelloWorld') #make sure window closes cleanly

When I execute these code. image will show in a pop up window, but I can not close this window by clicking the x on the top right corner, and a moment later, system will prompt me that the window is not responding, it will give me 2 choices: "wait" , "fore quit". if I hit wait, then It will show the same prompt later, If I hit 'fore quit', then the jupyter notebook kernel die and I have to start over.

I google around, many solution suggest that I should add this code

cv2.startWindowThread()

before imshow, but situation get worse, the kernel hang forever!. anybody have some idea what's going on.

Here is the pic of my error:

Answer 1

image = cv2.imread(file_path)
while True:
    # Press 'q' for exit
    exit_key = ord('q')
    if cv2.waitKey(exit_key) & 255 == exit_key:
        cv2.destroyAllWindows()
        break
    cv2.imshow('Image_title', image)

Answer 2

I was having a similar problem, and could not come to a good solution with cv2.imshow() in the Jupyter Notebook. I followed this stackoverflow answer, just using matplotlib to display the image.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# load image using cv2....and do processing.
plt.imshow(cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB))
# as opencv loads in BGR format by default, we want to show it in RGB.
plt.show()