How to disable Buffer in OpenCV Camera?

Question

I have this situation where I use OpenCV to detect faces in front of the camera and do some ML on those faces. The issue that I have is that once I do all the processing, and go to grab the next frame I get the past, not the present. Meaning, I'll read whats inside the buffer, and not what is actually in front of the camera. Since I don't care which faces came in front of the camera while processing, I care what is now in front of the camera.

I did try to set the buffer size to 1, and that did help quite a lot, but I still will get at least 3 buffer reads. Setting the FPS to 1, also dose not help remove this situation 100%. Bellow is the flow that I have.

let cv = require('opencv4nodejs');

let camera = new cv.VideoCapture(camera_port);

camera.set(cv.CAP_PROP_BUFFERSIZE, 1);
camera.set(cv.CAP_PROP_FPS, 2);
camera.set(cv.CAP_PROP_POS_FRAMES , 1);

function loop()
{
    //
    //  <>> Grab one frame from the Camera buffer.
    //
    let rgb_mat = camera.read();

    //  Do to gray scale

    //  Do face detection

    //  Crop the image

    //  Do some ML stuff

    //  Do whats needs to be done after the results are in.

    //
    //  <>> Release data from memory
    //
    rgb_mat.release();

    //
    //  <>> Restart the loop
    //
    loop();
}

My question is:

Is it possible to remove the buffer all-together? And if so, how. If not, a why would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Whether CAP_PROP_BUFFERSIZE is supported appears quite operating system and backend-specific. E.g., the 2.4 docs state it is "only supported by DC1394 [Firewire] v 2.x backend currently," and for backend V4L, according to the code, support was added only on 9 Mar 2018.

The easiest non-brittle way to disable the buffer is using a separate thread; for details, see my comments under Piotr Kurowski's answer. Here Python code that uses a separate thread to implement a bufferless VideoCapture: (I did not have a opencv4nodejs environment.)

import cv2, Queue, threading, time

# bufferless VideoCapture
class VideoCapture:

  def __init__(self, name):
    self.cap = cv2.VideoCapture(name)
    self.q = Queue.Queue()
    t = threading.Thread(target=self._reader)
    t.daemon = True
    t.start()

  # read frames as soon as they are available, keeping only most recent one
  def _reader(self):
    while True:
      ret, frame = self.cap.read()
      if not ret:
        break
      if not self.q.empty():
        try:
          self.q.get_nowait()   # discard previous (unprocessed) frame
        except Queue.Empty:
          pass
      self.q.put(frame)

  def read(self):
    return self.q.get()

cap = VideoCapture(0)
while True:
  frame = cap.read()
  time.sleep(.5)   # simulate long processing
  cv2.imshow("frame", frame)
  if chr(cv2.waitKey(1)&255) == 'q':
    break

The frame reader thread is encapsulated inside the custom VideoCapture class, and communication with the main thread is via a queue.

This answer suggests using cap.grab() in a reader thread, but the docs do not guarantee that grab() clears the buffer, so this may work in some cases but not in others.