Using other keys for the waitKey() function of opencv

The keycodes returned by waitKey seem platform dependent. However, it may be very educative, to see what the keys return (and by the way, on my platform, Esc does not return 27...)

The integers thay Abid's answer lists are mosty useless to the human mind (unless you're a prodigy savant...). However, if you examine them in hex, or take a look at the Least Significant Byte, you may notice patterns...

My script for examining the return values from waitKey is below:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import cv2
import sys

cv2.imshow(sys.argv[1], cv2.imread(sys.argv[1]))
res = cv2.waitKey(0)
print('You pressed %d (0x%x), LSB: %d (%s)' % (res, res, res % 256,
    repr(chr(res%256)) if res%256 < 128 else '?'))

You can use it as a minimal, command-line image viewer.

Some results, which I got:

• q letter:

  You pressed 1048689 (0x100071), LSB: 113 ('q')

• Escape key (traditionally, ASCII 27):

  You pressed 1048603 (0x10001b), LSB: 27 ('\x1b')

• Space:

  You pressed 1048608 (0x100020), LSB: 32 (' ')

This list could go on, however you see the way to go, when you get 'strange' results.

BTW, if you want to put it in a loop, you can just waitKey(0) (wait forever), instead of ignoring the -1 return value.

EDIT: There's more to these high bits than meets the eye - please see Andrew C's answer (hint: it has to do with keyboard modifiers like all the "Locks" e.g. NumLock).

My recent experience shows however, that there is a platform dependence - e.g. OpenCV 4.1.0 from Anaconda on Python 3.6 on Windows doesn't produce these bits, and for some (important) keys is returns 0 from waitKey() (arrows, Home, End, PageDn, PageUp, even Del and Ins). At least Backspace returns 8 (but... why not Del?).

So, for a cross platform UI you're probably restricted to W, A, S, D, letters, digits, Esc, Space and Backspace ;)

You can use ord() function in Python for that.

For example, if you want to trigger 'a' key press, do as follows :

if cv2.waitKey(33) == ord('a'):
   print "pressed a"

See a sample code here: Drawing Histogram

UPDATE :

To find the key value for any key is to print the key value using a simple script as follows :

import cv2
img = cv2.imread('sof.jpg') # load a dummy image
while(1):
    cv2.imshow('img',img)
    k = cv2.waitKey(33)
    if k==27:    # Esc key to stop
        break
    elif k==-1:  # normally -1 returned,so don't print it
        continue
    else:
        print k # else print its value

With this code, I got following values :

Upkey : 2490368
DownKey : 2621440
LeftKey : 2424832
RightKey: 2555904
Space : 32
Delete : 3014656
...... # Continue yourself :)