javacv-webcam: a skeleton project to do image processing with java

Recently I've simplified JavaCV Webcam project for an easy start with JavaCV and JavaFX.

If you follow me on this blog or my occasional posts on twitter, you surely know that I like to explore new features for JavaFX in combination with Scala. Lately, I had migrated SudokuFX to JavaCV. With this release SudokuFX doesn't use OpenCV directly anymore but uses JavaCV's wrapper which provided at the point of writing a more low level API to the Mat data structure. 

SudokuFX provides some examples on how to use JavaCV, however if you search for a simple example on how to use JavaCV and JavaFX and you want to access your webcam, javacv-webcam is the right project for you. 

javacv-webcam is written in 100% Java. It shows how to configure javafx-maven-plugin to create a custom java runtime image with jlink. 

Another aspect which is worth mentioning is that javacv-webcam is an example for a modular java application. Here it is worth mentioning that IntelliJ in a recent version has good support for writing module-info.java and compiler errors are helpful as well. 

I tried to make javacv-webcam a project with zero configuration, you should just be able to check out the project and just run it ... 

Note: on windows or linux you have to apply small changes in module-info.java, but this should pose no problem. On MacOsX you may have to fiddle around with privacy / security settings for java. Speaking of which - you have to use Java11 and a recent maven distribution.

For build instructions, just checkout github readme page. This post refers to javacv-webcam version 2020.3.0.

Note: There is an older version for javacv-webcam which is implemented in Scala and does some comparisons to other ways how to use JavaCV. Also, there is a newer version for javacv-webcam which contains configuration to compile it to a native binary using GraalVM.