I am an electronics engineer in my 60's and I remember a time when image processing was done with expensive special purpose hardware. I have worked on some of these processing engines. These days, OpenCV can even run on small project boards like the Pi and others.
I am interested in processing real time video and before I get too involved I would like to know if OpenCV can do what I require. For the moment, lets not consider video bandwidth, although I am sure that is an issue.
This should sound a lot like gaming. What I would like to do is take real time video from a camera, and with a joystick, move a visible cursor around in what I believe would be considered a type of overlay (that may have meant something different 30 years ago). If the cursor was in the form of a crosshair (like a target) then I would like to be able to put the crosshair over objects in the camera view.
That does not sound like it would be too hard for OpenCV because there is not any image processing to be done at this stage.
Image processing would come into play if i wanted to tag (shoot, click on, etc.) an object in the camera view. At that point the processor would have to know the position of or follow the object in question.
So, the analogy to a video game would be if I saw a person or moving object in the video field, and I put the cursor onto the object, the processor would have to "know" that the cursor is on the object in question, if i "trained" the processor to follow that kind of object. That would sound to me like a first person shooter game where the object was in live video.
To put this another way, the target would have to "know" that it was tagged.
I hope that makes sense. Thank You Tom
