Finding hotspots in an image to count LEDs and to read the LED color

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VB

Hello,
I have a question regarding manipulating images in VB.NET (2005). First, I'm not a VB.net expert. That's why I leave my question at this forum.

I have an image (3840x2748, 300dpi,24 bit depth) captured from a USB camera which contains at least 1024 leds (light emmiting diodes). The leds appears as hotspots in the image, so there is a led at for example X100&Y100 in the image, then some area black, then again a led and so on.
These leds can be lit as red, green and blue.
The goal is to capture the image from the camera (this works) and to detect if all leds are lit and with the correct color.

I've found many example code yet on this site, but none fullfills exact my needs. There are all more pointed into the direction of detecting face recognitions and so on. But for me I think this is a too complex approach for the thing need to be done.

So is there someone on this forum able to help me in this, to give me kind of jumpstart (if possible with example code in VB.net(2005) or links to some websites....) how I can achieve this with none complex code (I mean if possible with no extra libraries to be installed etc.)?


I have tried by my own to scan the image in X and Y direction to find for a hotspot, if one found I put a pixel (for ex yellow dot) and this seems to work. Now I see in my image on the places where a led is, my new yellow dots. But I can not count just these yellow dots.
There must be some way to collect the dots who are nearby eachother and represent this into a hotspot for the led. Then counting the hotspots should tell me the number of leds.
I also searched for something like ROI (RegionOfInterest), but all came out to face recognition, or finding objects in images.



Thanks a lot for any help,