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

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.

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/