Hi

i research about analyzing images (for the study and for interest). you know, face-recognition (or haptic gesture-recognition) is meanwhile spread widely, thanks to wii and xbox/kinect

i want to dive into this amazing world. get to know basics, play around with it and (if i got good enough) implementing such a feature exemplary. for stored images or, and that would be much cooler, as a lite-c-libary (think about another way of auto-targeting, webcam-games, etc)

so i need material about it.
do you know books, papers and magazins about this topic? does someone have experience with it?
i want to start recognizing a shape, like circles (i have an image of a bacteria culture).
currently i play with filter-effects to prepare the image for a recognition (-> creating a black/white image only with the bactiera-circles). but i have no idea how to recognize the shape efficiently