One of the most interesting projects I\'ve worked on in the past couple of years was a project about image processing. The goal was to develop a system to be able to recogni
If you are interested in it being realtime, then what you need is to add in a pre-processing filter to determine what gets scanned with the heavy-duty stuff. A good fast, very real time, pre-processing filter that will allow you to scan things that are more likely to be a coca-cola can than not before moving onto more iffy things is something like this: search the image for the biggest patches of color that are a certain tolerance away from the sqrt(pow(red,2) + pow(blue,2) + pow(green,2)) of your coca-cola can. Start with a very strict color tolerance, and work your way down to more lenient color tolerances. Then, when your robot runs out of an allotted time to process the current frame, it uses the currently found bottles for your purposes. Please note that you will have to tweak the RGB colors in the sqrt(pow(red,2) + pow(blue,2) + pow(green,2)) to get them just right.
Also, this is gona seem really dumb, but did you make sure to turn on -oFast compiler optimizations when you compiled your C code?