CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++opencvpng
user6133034
user6133034

Reputation:

OpenCV: PNG image with alpha channel

I'm new to OpenCV and I've done a small POC for reading an image from some URL.
I'm reading the image from an URL using video capture. The code is as follows:

VideoCapture vc;
vc.open("http://files.kurento.org/img/mario-wings.png");
if(vc.isOpened() && vc.grab()) 
{
       cv::Mat logo;
       vc.retrieve(logo);
       cv::namedWindow("t");
       imwrite( "mario-wings-opened.png", logo);
       cv::imshow("t", logo);
       cv::waitKey(0);
       vc.release();
}

This image is not opened correctly, possibly due to alpha channel. What is the way to preserve alpha channel and get the image correctly?

Any help is appreciated.
-Thanks

Expected output

Expected output

Actual output

Actual output

Upvotes: 2

Views: 6256

Answers (2)

Derzu
Derzu

Reputation: 7156

If you wanna draw it over another image you can do that:

/**
 * @brief Draws a transparent image over a frame Mat.
 * 
 * @param frame the frame where the transparent image will be drawn
 * @param transp the Mat image with transparency, read from a PNG image, with the IMREAD_UNCHANGED flag
 * @param xPos x position of the frame image where the image will start.
 * @param yPos y position of the frame image where the image will start.
 */
void drawTransparency(Mat frame, Mat transp, int xPos, int yPos) {
    Mat mask;
    vector<Mat> layers;

    split(transp, layers); // seperate channels
    Mat rgb[3] = { layers[0],layers[1],layers[2] };
    mask = layers[3]; // png's alpha channel used as mask
    merge(rgb, 3, transp);  // put together the RGB channels, now transp insn't transparent 
    transp.copyTo(frame.rowRange(yPos, yPos + transp.rows).colRange(xPos, xPos + transp.cols), mask);
}

Upvotes: 0

api55
api55

Reputation: 11420

if you are only loading an image, I recommend you to use imread instead, also, you will need to specified the second parameter of imread to load the alpha channel too, that is CV_LOAD_IMAGE_UNCHANGED or cv::IMREAD_UNCHANGED, depending on the version (in the worst case a -1 also works).

As far as I know, the VideoCaptureclass do not load images/video with a 4th channel. Since you are using a web url, loading the image won't work with imread, but you may use any method to download the data (curl for example) and then use imdecode with the data buffer to get the cv::Mat. OpenCV is a library for image processing, not for downloading images.

Upvotes: 5

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