How to Use Your Webcam with Roboflow Models

Brad Dwyer's blog post from March 30, 2021, outlines the process of using a USB webcam with a custom-trained Roboflow model for real-time image inference using Python. The tutorial requires Python 3.7+, along with installing several dependencies such as OpenCV, NumPy, and requests to connect the webcam, process the image data, and communicate with the Roboflow model API. The core of the demonstration involves capturing images from the webcam, resizing them, converting them to base64, and sending these to the Roboflow API for predictions, which are then displayed on the screen. The script runs in a loop until interrupted by the user pressing the 'q' key, and Dwyer suggests that performance can be improved by parallelizing requests to increase the frame rate. The accompanying code is available in the Roboflow API Snippets GitHub repository for those interested in experimenting with or enhancing the setup.