There's a lot to learn about image processing in general.
I recommend the
OpenCV tutorials/walkthroughs. Additionally, there are a
bunch of examples distributed in the OpenCV source tree -- try to run them locally and see what they do, and then modify them in small ways.
Once you've done that, then I recommend reading various FIRST-related image processing whitepapers and related code (search ChiefDelphi for these), to get a feel for what types of techniques you can use to accomplish the tasks you need to accomplish.
You may find that GRIP is a useful tool (I haven't used it, but it looks promising) to experiment with image processing techniques and such. In particular, screensteps has a
walkthrough on how to do image processing for the 2016 game using GRIP.