Python: use time.sleep with opencv without stopping the video footage-CodePudding

Im using opencv for detecting a hand gesture (in this case, when i lift my index finger), when that happens it prints "hi", then i use time.sleep to pause the print for 1 second because it will print it until I put my index down, but time.sleep pauses the entire footage, so if i sleep 5 seconds, the footage wont run untile those 5 seconds have passed

What can I do to use the time.sleep without pausing the footage

while True:
  #all the opencv initial stuff
  #mediapipe functions for the hand detection

  if INDEX_UP:
     print("hi")
     time.sleep(2)
  
  cv2.imshow("Frame", frame)
  if cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF == 27: break

Im trying to use time.sleep inside the while loop im using for opencv, but the time.sleep pauses the footage until the time.sleep finish

CodePudding user response：

I tried to use 2 separate threads for the entire while loop and another one for the sleep, it´s not sleeping.

def sleep():
  time.sleep(2)

def main_loop():
  while True:
  #all the opencv initial stuff
  #mediapipe functions for the hand detection

  if INDEX_UP:
     print("hi")
     th.Thread(target=sleep).start()
  
  cv2.imshow("Frame", frame)
  if cv2.waitKey(1) & 0xFF == 27: break

th.Thread(target=main_loop).start()

CodePudding user response：

time.sleep() will block the thread execution by the amount of time provided. This is described in this answer by Nick Bastin and also you can find useful examples.