This simple bit of code is for a project I'm working on. I intend to to simulate what it would look like if we has an extra cone in our eyes sensitive to near infrared light. This can be done by overlaying the feed of an IR camera over that of a normal camera. In reality we can't really conceive this new color. It would be akin to a colorblind p…

IR_vision_overlay.py

#must have OpenCV installed
import cv2

#gets video feed from both cameras (this is for Linux)
cam = cv2.VideoCapture(0)
cam2 = cv2.VideoCapture(1)

#main loop
while True:
    #process video feeds
    im_value, img = cam.read()
    im_value, img2 = cam2.read()
    img2 = cv2.cvtColor(img2, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
    #increase contrast to highlight IR hotspots
    img2 = cv2.equalizeHist(img2)
    img2 = cv2.cvtColor(img2, cv2.COLOR_GRAY2BGR)
    #removes green channel for magenta color
    img2[:,:,1] = 0

    #overlays IR image
    im_merge = cv2.addWeighted(img,0.7, img2,0.3, 0)
    cv2.imshow('Press ESC to exit', im_merge)

    #exit on ESC
    if cv2.waitKey(1) == 27:
        break
cv2.destroyAllWindows()