Webcam video stream processing

I'm working with an image processing project, my final goal is to detect features on a real time video and finally track those features.

I will be working with an Embedded Processor Platform called Freescale's i.MX515, it is a 32-bit media processor running on Ubuntu 9.04.

Right now I'm working on the algorithms to locate the features, so, I'm using still images. When I'm satisfied with the results I will have to start using a video stream and I don't want to make use of a video file as a source stream, because then I will have to worry about video decoders then. Instead I would like to plug in a USB Wecam to the embedded platform (It has USB ports on it), directly take the frames as they are captured and send it to my application.

I will take care to buy a webcam which will be supported in Linux (Device driver). But my question is will I be able to capture the incoming video stream from the webcam and send it to my application? Will I be able to configure the webcam and DMA to write th开发者_运维知识库e incoming frames in a particular memory location whose pointer I can simply pass to my application? (Confused!!!)

I hope I could convey my doubts, can anyone guide me with what steps that I have to take to achieve all of these easily? Do you foresee any impossibility here?

Help!!!

Regards

Vikram

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I'm not right person that can give an answer to this question, because I worked in video coding and I didn't make any software to capture video from a web cam, but I think that you can do what you want.
That a look at this link, I think you can use that as a starting point.

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This link is long inactive, but still comes up near the top in Google search for web cam streaming. So let me formally close the topic with a relevant pointer to the solution: Open CV can be used to achieve this. http://opencv.org/