seeking HW + SW system to do pixel processing algorithm dev

I am looking for this, and here are some comments I made in another group about the arduino camera, to give you the flavor of the search:

Nobody ever bothers to do it that way. They buy one of a certain handful

of models of webcam and hack them to do what is needed.



http://www.qcuiag.org.uk/

Yes, they do that, and I am hoping someone on that yahoo group will have done what I want to do. Here is a comment on the arduino camera mentioned above. The Good, Bad, and Ugly. First, it is a low cost way of getting an image under computer control. And for the nuts-and-bolts builder, you have a Real Time video of what the image sensor sees. (after that, you can put it into 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 output.) And what the PC sees is a jpg.
The Ugly: There is no evident way to do a RT-ish pixel programming with this thing. It doesn't look like the image is accessible in any memory image so that some C code can do segmentation and other tricks of simple image analysis. 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 issues 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 that the image is somehow available on the arduino for processing there.

A computer image capture device without software access to the pixels is like a car without a steering wheel that stays parked in the driveway. It's basically just a computer-controlled camera. Getting back to the Jupiter picture example, what I want is an image of Jupiter AND a way to scan it for events automatically, programmed by me.

Nevertheless, the pointers are very valuable, particularly the astronomy group. 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 fedex trucking forms. I used neural nets for the character recognition, and other approaches for alignment, etc. This current project is actually much easier.

any ideas welcome. JB