I always feel like somebody's watching me

A tough night of tinkering. I decided to play around with the vision part of my OXO project. Specifically, I wanted to see if I could get Python to grab an image from a webcam and analyse it for objects.

I started off by googling "Python grab webcam image", which led me to install OpenCV, a high-end computer vision package. To be honest, I wasted loads of time playing with this, unable to get it to work.I couldn't find a binary, so I had to try to compile my own from source files, which is something I have no real experience of doing. After several frustrating hours I gave up and tried a different tack.

Pythom has some built-in image analysis libraries called PIL, which does some of the work for you, and there's a third-party add-on called VideoCapture which will allow you access your PC's webcam.

A bit of fiddling around and I eventually managed to get a way of quickly analysing all the pixels in an image and identifiying the ones I'm interested in. Here, for example, is it finding similar skin colours in a snapshot of me:

So, with this in mind it should not be too hard to identify a nought or cross on a sheet of paper, especially if it's a different colour.

Now it's half past midnight, so I must go to bed.