Displaying Current Pictures From A Camera - UPDATED

I would like to develop an application that will receive pictures from a camera and maybe afterwards save it in 开发者_运维百科a database. This is what i want to do:

When the picture is taken it is send to the program immediately (or the program must read the current picture taken) then display it. I will take pictures of many people or things so anytime a picture is taken i want to see the current picture displayed in the program.

I have googled if i can see an example application so that i know that it possible so that i can do mine from scratch. But couldn't find any so i am not sure if it is possible to do it in java.

So guys am asking for guidelines how i can do it in java. I just need the steps then i will program everything myself.

Thanks.

UPDATE

* It is a desktop application(J2SE).

* The camera will be constantly link to the computer on which the application is running whiles the pictures are been taken via cable for the moment(later maybe wireless).

* I will use any one of the ordinary digital cameras around

If JMF (link) runs on your system it is fairly easy to grab photographs from your streaming video. Check this sample code if you run on Windows. (Knowledge blog)

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.image.*;
import javax.imageio.*;
import javax.media.*;
import javax.media.control.*;
import javax.media.format.*;
import javax.media.util.*;


/**
 * Grabs a frame from a Webcam, overlays the current date and time, and saves the frame as a PNG to c:\webcam.png
 *
 * @author David
 * @version 1.0, 16/01/2004
 */
public class FrameGrab
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        // Create capture device
        CaptureDeviceInfo deviceInfo = CaptureDeviceManager.getDevice("vfw:Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32):0");
        Player player = Manager.createRealizedPlayer(deviceInfo.getLocator());
        player.start();

        // Wait a few seconds for camera to initialise (otherwise img==null)
        Thread.sleep(3000);

        // Grab a frame from the capture device
        FrameGrabbingControl frameGrabber = (FrameGrabbingControl)player.getControl("javax.media.control.FrameGrabbingControl");
        Buffer buf = frameGrabber.grabFrame();

        // Convert frame to an buffered image so it can be processed and saved
        Image img = (new BufferToImage((VideoFormat)buf.getFormat()).createImage(buf));
        BufferedImage buffImg = new BufferedImage(img.getWidth(null), img.getHeight(null), BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
        Graphics2D g = buffImg.createGraphics();
        g.drawImage(img, null, null);

        // Overlay curent time on image
        g.setColor(Color.RED);
        g.setFont(new Font("Verdana", Font.BOLD, 16));
        g.drawString((new Date()).toString(), 10, 25);

        // Save image to disk as PNG
        ImageIO.write(buffImg, "png", new File("c:\\webcam.png"));

        // Stop using webcam
        player.close();
        player.deallocate();
        System.exit(0);
    }
}