UVC camera exposure timing in OpenCV

USB cameras can have the exposure set to manual (cheaper ones have only full auto mode). It’s a pretty straight forward function in OpenCV, but insufficiently documented thus hard to find exact times and calculations. Also there are two major implementations for Linux and Windows.

• Linux – exposure times are set in units 1/s (all clear here)
• Windows – exposure times are selected from a table where index ranges typically from 0 to -13. Value 0 means the longest exposure and -13 is the shortest time (fastest shutter).

Windows indexed exposure values are a logarithmic function of time. The equation is very simple EXP_TIME = 2^(-EXP_VAL) and exact values listed in the table below.

This results in a straight graph on the logarithmic scale.

And simple python code example is listed below. It Opens the camera, prepares fro MJPEG stream, and displays the real-time view on the screen.

import cv2

print("Initializing camera")

camera = cv2.VideoCapture(0)
print("Setting camera mode")

exp_val = -6

codec = 0x47504A4D # MJPG
camera.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FPS, 30.0)
camera.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FOURCC, codec)
camera.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_WIDTH, 1920)
camera.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_FRAME_HEIGHT, 1080)
camera.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_EXPOSURE, exp_val)

print("Starting capture")
while(1):
	camera.grab()
	retval, im = camera.retrieve(0)
	cv2.imshow("image", im)

	k = cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xff
	if k == 27:
		print("exit")
		break

camera.release()
cv2.destroyAllWindows()