uEye camera not detected with VideoCapture

Question

I'm pretty stuck on a problem with my uEye camera. Using my laptop camera (id 0) or internet camera on usb (id 1) this line works perfectly: TheVideoCapturer.open(1); (TheVideoCapturer is of VideoCapture class, OpenCV).

Unfortunately, when I try to do the same with my uEye camera, it can't find it. I checked the camera ID in the ueyecameramanager, and it's 1. Or 35, in some expert mode. I'd like to use it the same way I used mentioned above cameras.

I've got the drivers, because, well, the ueyecameramanager works and gives me some stream, and ROS node ueye_cam works fine as well .

Any sort of advice would be gladly appreciated.

Answer 1

Even though you have probably already figured it out as far as I know you cannot use VideoCapture directly with uEye cameras. You have to use their own SDK to access the videostream (or take a single snapshot depending on your case). After that you can use memcpy() to copy the memory that is pointed by void pointer filled by is:GetImageMem(...) to the Mat object (cv::Mat::ptr()). If you look close enough what the ROS node for uEye does it actually uses the functions provided by the uEye SDK to set and access the camera. ROS also has its own image format and that is why an interface is implemented (called cv_bridge) to convert ROS images to OpenCV images. Overall it's a ridiculous salad of data copying and conversion but since this is how things currently are you don't have much of a choice there.