How to Mirror your Android Screen with OpenCV

This repository contain tools and step by step explanation on "how to mirror your android screen with opencv" and send touch inputs via command line.

Note: This repository contains codes for windows platform only, if you want to use it on linux or Mac OS you need to replace scrcpy-win64 directory with your suported platform click here to download.

I was always curious to know a way so that i could be able to access my android screen so that, i can perform image procssing and do some automation tasks like... making Game bots.

Required Modules

>> pip install opencv-contrib-python
>> pip install numpy
>> pip install pyautogui
>> pip install imutils
>> pip install pillow
>> pip install psutils
>> pip install zipfile

Problem

• I didn't knew any way to stream the android display to my pc.
• Though i found several applications like apower mirror, but it was paid application.
• i wanted to interact with the screen itself, but the only way i found was to use my pc's cursor to manually touch the screen from my pc.
• so far i used pyautogui, to automate my pc cursor movements, but the problem was, i wasn't able to interact with my pc while the script ran.

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Solution

• Using this useful opensource tool scrcpy, which utilises adb under the hood to stream android's display directly to my pc.
• since it is using adb i can send touch inputs via command line. eg: adb shell input tap x y
• The only downside is, scrcpy displays the android screen in an separate window, so i need to set the window to left half of my pc screen and then using PIL to read my pc's screen and there after cropping the Android's screen from the whole pc's screen.
• This idea sounds a little complicated, but it works somehow!
• I am currently working on the source code of scrcpy so that i could be able to extract the screen as an numpy array directly from my python script, so i don't need to capture my pc's screen and cropping out Android's screen out of it.

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How to Do it YOURSELF!

Step 1:

Open up Developer options inside your Android settings and turn on USB Debugging

Step 2:

Install this app a paper from Play Store. we will use this app to test if our script is sending touch inputs to our Android phone.

Step 3:

Ok! Now final time, lets launch our program capture_android_Screen.py

Output will be similar to below Image:

Command prompt is showing instructions: >> Press Enter to continue , wait till your Android Screen shows up on your pc screen.

After all these steps are completed Arrange your Android screen and Command prompt in the same manner as shown in below image.

If you are running this program on your pc for the first time, you need to tell the program, where to look for the android screen on your whole computer screen to crop out only the region of interest as per your pc's screen resolution.

Let me tell you how to do it, take a screen shot of your pc screen while, android screen is arranged on the half left side of your pc screen. Next open up screen shot using MS Paint we are doing this to know the coordinates of android screen.

as in the picture above you can see, i have marked a small red dot on top left corner of our Android screen, do the same thing with your screen shot image and in the lower left corner you will see the coordinates.. i have marked them in red circle its 174,31

Do the same thing for lower right corner as shown in the below image and note the coordinates somewhere.

When all this is done you can openup capture_android_Screen.py and update those coordinates on line 11 with yours.

Now finally you can go to Command prompt and Hit Enter to see the magic.

Before hitting Enter, make sure you have launched the app which we had previously downloaded a paper. and pinch in a little bit so that when touch event happens it would show a big black dot on the touched portion of the Android screen.

So, if everything goes fine, after 5th Frame, you will see, a black dot on your Android screen. This means, we were able to register touch to our Android phone via command line.

• if you want to touch at different coordinate on your phone you can pass the coordinate on line 104

Vola! I knew you can do it!

if you face any issues, let me know.. we will figure it out together. any contributions are most welcome.

Hit me on twitter: @imneonizer

contact: mneonizer@gmail.com

insta: @the.nitin.rai