Display date and time in videos using OpenCV Python

OpenCV is an Open Source Computer Vision Library in python. It provides numerous functions to perform various Image and video processing operations. The library uses the python Numpy module to represent all the video or image arrays as a ndarray type. It needs the numpy library, we need to make sure that the numpy module is also installed in our python interpreter.

Displaying date and time in videos using OpenCV

In live streaming/video processing applications sometimes we need to display the date and time on videos. To achieve this, we can use the python datetime module.

The python datetime module is used to work with dates and times, it has various classes and functions to manipulate or represent dates and times in various formats. In this article, we will learn how to display date and time in videos using OpenCV Python.

OpenCV provides a method called cv2.putText(). It is used to write a text string in an image or video frames and this will be the main function for this task.

Syntax

cv.putText(img, text, org, fontFace, fontScale, color[, thickness[, lineType[, bottomLeftOrigin]]])

Where,

• img: Input image/frame.

• Text: A text string which has to be drawn.

• org: A tuple of two coordinate values i.e. (X coordinate value, Y coordinate value).

• fontFace: it specifies the font type. The supported font types are:

• FONT_HERSHEY_SIMPLEX

• FONT_HERSHEY_PLAIN

• FONT_HERSHEY_DUPLEX

• FONT_HERSHEY_COMPLEX

• FONT_HERSHEY_TRIPLEX

• FONT_HERSHEY_COMPLEX_SMALL

• FONT_HERSHEY_SCRIPT_SIMPLEX

• FONT_HERSHEY_SCRIPT_COMPLEX

• FONT_ITALIC

• fontScale: The font scale factor that is multiplied by the font-specific base size. It is used to increase/decrease the size of the text.

• color: It is used to specify the color of the text. It takes the value in BGR format.

• thickness (Optional): It specify the thickness of the lines used to draw the text. The default value is 1.

• lineType (Optional): It specifies the type of line we want to use. The available 4 Line Types are −

• FILLED

• LINE_4

• LINE_8 (Default)

• LINE_AA

• LeftOrigin (Optional): The default value is False. Put the text the top-left corner of the image.

Approach

• Open the camera or read the input video file using cv2.VideoCapture() function.

• Grab each frame using the video_obj.read() function.

• Write the current DateTime on each frame using cv2.putText() function.

• And finally, display each frame using cv2.imshow()

• For closing, release the webcam and destroy all windows using video_obj.release() and cv2.destroyAllWindows() functions respectively.

Using a video file

By specifying the video file location to the cv2.VideoCapture() function it will read the video file data.

Example

In this example, we will display the current date and time on video.

import numpy
import cv2
import datetime
  
# open the video
video = cv2.VideoCapture('Videos/Flowers video.mp4')

while(video.isOpened()):
   ret, frame = video.read()
   if ret:
      # describe the font type
      font = cv2.FONT_HERSHEY_SIMPLEX
   
      # Get current date and time  
      date_time = str(datetime.datetime.now())
   
      # write the date time in the video frame
      frame = cv2.putText(frame, date_time,(10, 100),font, 1,(210, 155, 155), 4, cv2.LINE_4)
         
      # show the video
      cv2.imshow('frame', frame)
      key = cv2.waitKey(10)
      
      if key == ord('q'): break
   else: break

video.release()
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Output

We have successfully displayed the current date time on a video output.

Using live video footage

We will display the current date time on a captured the live footage.

Example

In this example, we will display date and time in a live videos using OpenCV Python.

import cv2
import datetime
cap = cv2.VideoCapture(0)
while True:
   ret, frame = cap.read()
   
   # describe the font type
   font = cv2.FONT_ITALIC
   
   # write current Date & Time on each frame
   date_time = str(datetime.datetime.now())
   
   # write the date time in the video frame
   cv2.putText(frame,date_time,(10,100), font, 1,(0,0,255),2,cv2.LINE_AA)
   
   # show the video
   cv2.imshow('frame',frame)
   
   # wait for keypress
   k = cv2.waitKey(10)
   if k == ord('q'):
      break
cap.release()
cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Output