Background: I know the basics of C/C++ decently well. I am part of a university robots club. We are programming 'bots to play soccer. Our 'bot team has (I think) 5 'bots on it as does the opponent. The system output is a Bluetooth signal the the 'bots tells them where to move and what to do. System input is a video stream. I got to write a program that can analyze the video and locate the red/blue circles (the 'bots). What do I do? I may need to convert frames to normal image files eg bmp. I need to open the mage file or stream and look for the redest and bluest parts and determine their location. I have no clue how to do this. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Maybe articles that discuss this or open source projects that handle video streams or parse graphics? Thanks!

Thanks. This is about 1,000X more powerfull than I need but the basic parts should be helpful.

This issue is very platform dependant.

On windows you'll want to use DirectShow or Video for Windows (legacy), or as the previous poster mentioned a wrapper around DirectShow like OpenCV.

On linux most robocup teams seem to be using Video for Linux.

My suggestion is that you google for James Bruce's CMUVision library which is also linked to from the CMU (Coral) Robocup website. It will give you plenty of ideas to get started as well as offering a reasonable introduction to the practicalities of getting the statistics side of things up and going.

Thanks for the idea.
I probably should've mentioned the platform. Its Windows.