There is a copmuter vision lecture series with Dr. Mubarak Shah that the University of Central Florida recently published to YouTube. It looks like the lectures are from the fall / winter of 2012. I’ve found these lectures extremely helpful in a lot of the computer vision learning and research that I’ve been doing.
This tutorial covers SIFT feature extraction, and matching SIFT features between two images using OpenCV’s ‘matcher_simple’ example. It does not go as far, though, as setting up an object recognition demo, where you can identify a trained object in any image.
Finding simple setup instructions for getting some OpenCV sample code up and running is a pain. They seem to make significant changes in each release, which means that an article providing setup instructions for an older version may not work for the latest. A lot of the instructions are geared towards being setup to recompile OpenCV, which you’re probably not interested in when you’re just getting started.
Microsoft has created an incredible device with the Micorosoft Kinect. Microsoft’s SDK is able to identify and track the skeletons of players in the frame. However, it does not provide any information about the position of the player’s fingers.