Processing a live video from the camera

External and built-in webcams are the sources of live video. There are several cases of using this capability:

• Transform input frames and show it on the screen. You then get a kind of "magic mirror" interactive project.

• Add some objects over live video. In this way, you obtain a kind of Augmented Reality (AR) application with 3D or cartoon objects added over video.

• Analyze human silhouette and gestures, find human faces, and perform some action based on this knowledge. For example, it can be the cartoon character repeating your mimics, or gesture-based drawing interactive installation.

It is enough to use video processing methods described in the preceding sections for creating simple art and interactive projects. For more advanced processing, there is a need to use deeper image analyzing techniques, which will be considered in Chapter 9, Computer Vision with OpenCV.

Now we will consider how to capture live video using openFrameworks. It can be done with...