Accessing android phone Camera thru USB from my java openCV application in real time

Question

I'm trying to learn computer vision with OpenCV and i need camera to work with but the only camera that i have is on my android phone.

So im thinking about connecting it to my pc (via USB) and using it with my application. Is anything like that possible? Can i take information from camera connected via usb in real time?

I have no experience with something like this. I know i can just record video ,save it,put it on my pc, and use it as resource -bud i would prefer to have real time streaming of video while my application will work in background on my desktop computer.

Will i have to code some android application to get this working?Or can i simple ask for that data from my desktop application?

Answer 1

If you only want to experiment and learn to use OpenCV, you can get an IP Camera app for your phone and then read the image stream from your computer ( here's an example of how to do that). That is the easiest "real time-ish" solution I can think of.

Answer 2

I found a simple way to use the a web cam (IP Webcam installed on my smartphone through Play Store) as camera using OpenCV and Java. Here is how: just copy the IP Webcam web link inside the Video Capture. Like this.

org.opencv.videoio.VideoCapture webSource = new VideoCapture("http://192.168.43.1:8080/video"); 

The smartphone and the laptop should be inside the same Wi-Fi.