Capturing and processing video from a webcam

We will use a webcam in this chapter to capture video data. Let's see how to capture the video from the webcam using OpenCV-Python.

How to do it…

1. Create a new Python file, and import the following packages:

   import cv2

2. OpenCV provides a video capture object that we can use to capture images from the webcam. The 0 input argument specifies the ID of the webcam. If you connect a USB camera, then it will have a different ID:

   # Initialize video capture object
   cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0)

3. Define the scaling factor for the frames captured using the webcam:

   # Define the image size scaling factor
   scaling_factor = 0.5

4. Start an infinite loop and keep capturing frames until you press the Esc key. Read the frame from the webcam:

   # Loop until you hit the Esc key
   while True:
       # Capture the current frame
       ret, frame = cap.read()

5. Resizing the frame is optional but still a useful thing to have in your code:

       # Resize the frame
       frame = cv2.resize(frame, None, fx=scaling_factor...