I got a question of image capture with a PC camera(integrated note book camera or web cam). While I am developing a computer vision system in which high quality image capture is the key issue, most of the current method is use VFW or directShow to capture video stream and snap one frame as an image.
However, this method could not get high quality image ( or using up the full capacity of the camera). For example, I got a 5 mega pixel web cam. but the video stream is maximum 720P(USB bandwidth problem?). Video streaming is wasting some of the camera sensors.
Could I video streaming and taking picture independently? like inputing video with a 640*480 video stream and render on the stream. then take a picture of 1280*720 from the same cam? I guess this would be a hardware problem? the new HTC one X camera?
In short, it's there a way for a PC system to take a picture ,full use of the sensor capacity, without video streaming and capture one frame. Is this a hardware related problem? Does common web cam support this? Or a Software problem, I should learn DirectShow things? Thanks a lot.
I vaguely remember (some) video sources offer both a capture and still pin, the latter I assume would offer you higher quality. You can easily test this in GraphEdit. If it works then yes, you'll have to learn DirectShow. Or pay someone to code this for you.