UDP Live Image Streaming

This project is inspired by https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~teammco/misc/udp_video/ , where images are grabbed from camera on one machine and transfered to another machine via UDP, resulting in negligible latency.

Parameters such as stream size or quality can be adjusted in config.h before re-compile the program.

Grabbing

The code grabs video stream from OpenCV's default input video device. To change input source, simply change the argument passed to cv::VideoCapture() accordingly.

Encoding

To avoid latency altogether there is no video codec involved during this process. Every frame is individually encoded to jpeg format by OpenCV to drastically reduce the bandwidth consumption.

If passing raw image is preferred, consider changing jpeg to bmp.

Demo

Run the following command to see stream your camera through localhost: (CMake and OpenCV required)

git clone https://github.com/chenxiaoqino/udp-image-streaming.git
cd udp-image-streaming/
cmake . && make
./server 10000 &
./client 127.0.0.1 10000

You should see two windows, one with the original grabbed image (before encoding) and one with received live-stream image (after encoding/decoding).

Acknowledgement and Copyright

This project is built upon various open-sourced libraries, like Practical C++ Sockets and OpenCV 3 ; please refer to their original license accordingly (GPL/BSD). Code of this project is puslished under MIT License.