Machine Vision:Image Analysis, Pattern Recognition

Very recently, I am interested in image recognition and understanding.(There are lots of nuances and sub or related fields : pattern recognition, character recognition, machine vision, image analysis, image classification, OCR, facial recognition, biometry). And wish to develop a simple project to be able to learn quicker. This can be reading the texts in a photograph (character recognition), licence plates of vehicles, etc. etc.

I have just browsed the internet to warm up to the subject.
Software written with VB is generally as quick as the ones written with C++ . But when it comes to graphics C++ is way ahead. So there seems I have two options :

Learn C++ :
The downside is that it will take a loooong time, until I can learn enough to write vision software, very long. Too long to bear with! First I need to learn C++ then I need to specialize in AI and neural networks etc. which are very though as they include lots of advanced mathematics. This nearly seems out of question.

Use VB with ActiveX written in C or C++ :
This will be a very direct approach, once I could specify and find the components I need I can start a project. There even are components where you place 3 controls on a form, no code at all and you have a barcode reader application ready ! The downside will be the costs for the components (which are generally thousands of dollars for image recognition or alike) and the inability to develop my own customized recognition algorithms, neural networks and optimizations. Anyway this is not a great downside since I do not need to reinvent the wheel and am not likely to find a better algorithm.

However the second option is more appealing to me.

So I will appreciate your ideas and comments for the following :

1. Where can I find any visual basic code that implements some kind of AI such as a neural network ? Even if it would be very slow I would like to see how such a task could be coded in VB.

2 Do you happen to know any activex/dll for image analysis ?
I have found a couple but maybe you have any experience.

3. In fact I do not know exactly where to start. I need an Entry Point to this field.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts. Any suggestion or general talk would be welcome too.

Tuluhan

With Visual Basic and a bit of API it is possible to do some pretty powerful image reading.
To do this you need to work with Device Independent Bitmaps.
A device independent bitmap is implemented as a header record which describes the bitmaps attributes followed by an array of RGBQuad values which tell you what colour a given pixel of the bitmap is.
Once you have access to this array you can read it using standard array access.

I recommend you get a hold of "The Visual basic programmers guide to the Win32 API" by Daniel Appleman and read chapter 9.

HTH,
Duncan

I dont know if this link (Lucky's VB gaming) (http://www.rookscape.com/vbgaming/tutAY.php) has any information you might be interested in, it contains a way of accessing individual pixel much faster than SetPixel and GetPixel.