web camera or else ? 15-30 fps processing of camera videos.

[Matt D]

Newbie wrote:
> I am doing some robotics projects but my main area of interest is
> trying out several algorithms for the processing of the stream of data
> coming from the video.

<snip>

Same for me!  From what I can tell, a cheap webcam will "just work" with 
a recent version of windows - i.e. plug it in using USB and then you can 
have programmatic access to the data and grab frames very easily.  This 
setup works fine with my digital camera working as a webcam - real £10 
webcams should be the same.  Not sure what Linux compatibility is like 
these days - for that I know for a fact that the Hauppauge USB WinTV 
thing works (or at least the hardware version I have works) with Linux.

For linux I found this (now on the wayback archive - original page is 
now 404): 
http://web.archive.org/web/20020322015936/http://staff.aist.go.jp/naoyuki.ichimura/research/tips/v4ln_e.htm

Hopefully that is some help.

Oh by the way, speed on a modern machine shouldn't be an issue - my 
badly written prototype in visual basic of all things (dont laugh - 
seemed like a good idea at the time!) was tracking a single coloured 
object reliably at significantly greater than 30fps (it automatically 
altered the window it searched in based on size and amount of movement 
of the object - at times it was approaching 100fps) on a modest by 
today's standards 1.4ghz pc, using a 320x240 stream.