sending pickled data via UDP, unpickle fails with UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

This is my code snippet that sends data over ethernet from one PC to another which is working fine.

import cv2, socket, pickle
import numpy as np
while True:
    ret, photo = cap.read()
    ret, buffer = cv2.imencode(".jpg",photo, [int(cv2.IMWRITE_JPEG_QUALITY),30])
    x_as_bytes = pickle.dumps(buffer)
    socket.sendto((x_as_bytes),(server_ip,server_port))

At the receiver end, I am not able to decode it. It says:

Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "receive.py", line 12, in <module>
       data=pickle.loads(data)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

This is the snippet at the receiver end

while True:
    x=s.recvfrom(1000000)
    clientip = x[1][0]
    data=x[0]
    print(data)
    data=pickle.loads(data) #ERROR IN THIS LINE
    print(type(data))
    data = cv2.imdecode(data, cv2.IMREAD_COLOR)
    cv2.imshow('server', data)
    if cv2.waitKey(10) == 13:
        break

Answer

Why are you even pickling the data? You can send binary data via UDP anyway:

# Synthetic image
im = np.random.randint(0, 256,(480, 640, 3), dtype=np.uint8)

# JPEG encode
ret, buffer = cv2.imencode(".jpg", im, [int(cv2.IMWRITE_JPEG_QUALITY),30])

# Send
socket.sendto(buffer.tobytes(), (server_ip,server_port))

---

Then at the receiving end:

JPEG = s.recvfrom(1000000)
im = cv2.imdecode(np.frombuffer(JPEG, dtype=np.uint8), cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED)