Read Images programmatically

i am a 3rd year computer science student, and my seminar(graduation project) is in the next semester, so i started to think about it and i thought that a face recognition system would be a great idea, so i have two questions:

1- ho开发者_JAVA技巧w can i read a picture programmatically, i mean if i have a picture, how can read the pixels and colors in order to recognize the face later on?

2- do you know any useful ebooks or resources that might help me in this topic cuzz i am really interested about it, and i hope that i can implement it.

thank you very much dudes

this is my first post and i hope you will really help me :)

Take a look at OpenCV which makes access to webcams easy! It can also help you with further picture computations.

Take a look at AForge.NET library. This library has very usefull API for computer vision. Take a look also on articles writen by author of this library - Andrew Kirillov. He wrote about motion detection algorithms and hand gesture recognition.