Johns Blog

Lightweight Development Prefixes

Lately I have been writing a lot of native code against multiple OpenCV versions. Like many Linux developers I tend to keep different development prefixes isolated using LD_LIBRARY_PATH (and friends).

I recently took the time to clean up a little script I use for this purpose, and posted it online. Inspired by virtualenv, it now has a prompt!

To use the script:

1. create the development directory
2. copy the script there
3. source /path/to/env.sh

please leave comments or suggestions on the gist.

Interfacing Python + C + OpenCV via ctypes

I was recently asked to help a colleague access his image processing C-library from python; quite a common task. As those of you who are familiar with Python might realise, there are a whole bag of ways that this can be accomplished;

• SWIG

• Cython

• ctypes

• PybindGen

In this case the colleague only needed to access a single function from the library returning image data, and then hand this result onto OpenCV. One happy side effect of the new (> v2.1) python-opencv bindings is that they do no validation on CvImage.SetData, which means you can pass an arbitrary string/pointer. Because of this I advised him I thought using something like SWIG was overkill, and he could just write a wrapper to his library using ctypes, or a thin python extension directly.

Image data contains embedded NULLs, and I could not find a concise example of dealing with non null-terminated, non-string char * arrays via ctypes so I wrote one.

# char *test_get_data_nulls(int *len);

func = lib.test_get_data_nulls
func.restype = POINTER(c_char)
func.argtypes = [POINTER(c_int)]

l = c_int()
data = func(byref(l))

print data,l,data.contents

and, another approach

# void test_get_data_nulls_out(char **data, int *len);

func_out = lib.test_get_data_nulls_out
func_out.argtypes = [POINTER(POINTER(c_char)), POINTER(c_int)]
func.restype = None

l2 = c_int()
data2 = POINTER(c_char)()
func_out(byref(data2), byref(l2))

print data2,l2,data2.contents

The full code can be found here and contains examples showing how to deal with data of this type using ctypes, and by writing a simple python extension linking with the library in question.