I am looking for this, and here are some comments I made in another group a bout the arduino camera, to give you the flavor of the search:
Yes, they do that, and I am hoping someone on that yahoo group will have do ne what I want to do. Here is a comment on the arduino camera mentioned abo ve. The Good, Bad, and Ugly. First, it is a low cost way of getting an imag e under computer control. And for the nuts-and-bolts builder, you have a Re al Time video of what the image sensor sees. (after that, you can put it in to snap shot mode.) How useful is that! Now the bad: A snap shot with this board requires a SD card on the arduino. The pic is loaded onto the card, and then must be transferred to the PC - taking 30 seconds or more. (The video described above is via direct NTSC ou tput.) And what the PC sees is a jpg. The Ugly: There is no evident way to do a RT-ish pixel programming with thi s thing. It doesn't look like the image is accessible in any memory image s o that some C code can do segmentation and other tricks of simple image ana lysis. Further, it seems that the arduino uses something called "sketches." Is there a C compiler which can access the image? Dunno, but doesn't look good. Finally, it would be nice to have access of the pixel train as it iss ues from the chip. This is a "nice to have," so no big deal.
So you see, my requirements are more stringent than creating nice astronomy pictures. BUT - it could be that the software is available somewhere, or t hat the image is somehow available on the arduino for processing there.
A computer image capture device without software access to the pixels is li ke a car without a steering wheel that stays parked in the driveway. It's b asically just a computer-controlled camera. Getting back to the Jupiter pic ture example, what I want is an image of Jupiter AND a way to scan it for e vents automatically, programmed by me.
Nevertheless, the pointers are very valuable, particularly the astronomy gr oup. I think it likely that somebody there has done image analysis from an imaging chip. Plus signal enhancement.
I got into the image software by doing OCR programming of documents like fe dex trucking forms. I used neural nets for the character recognition, and o ther approaches for alignment, etc. This current project is actually much e asier.
any ideas welcome. JB