Hello,
First of all the camera will be put on a small rc-airplane.
I was thinking of an image size: 640x480
The task i want it to perform is to scan an area and determine the approximate number of people (crowd counting) and if feasible and within the capability of the microcontroller to determine the gender of each.
I was thinking of an Arduino but it seems to me it won't handle it especially within time (will be placed on a plane).
Raspberry Pi maybe ?
Does anyone know (within a reasonable price range) any microcontrollers capable of that ? Can an arduino do that ?
Thank you for your time.
You don't do efficient image processing with microcontrollers, you use micro processors or processors.
For the person counting you'll need to use a computer, running an application based on OpenCV or similar. The fact the camera is moving relative to the crowd will make things harder and probably prevent you from getting an accurate count, but if you are able to separate the stream into a sequence of non-overlapping images then you should be able to get an approximate count.
I have no idea how you'd differentiate between male and female and I doubt that part is feasible.
This one certainly got my attention: http://www.trossenrobotics.com/p/roboard-rb-110.aspx
In description mentioned as Compatible with Windows, if i could run OpenCV through the OS would that be enough ?
And what about CUDA ?
That CPU board is basically a low end PC and has been discontinued, but there are many other similar x86-based boards.
The ARM-based Raspberry Pi is slower by a factor of about 3, but is otherwise comparable at about 1/10 the price. I think OpenCV is fully implemented. Here is some work on face recognition http://www.raspberrypi.org/facial-recognition-opencv-on-the-camera-board/