The design of a low-cost microprocessor-based real-time image acquisition and processing system is presented. The design criteria of a real-time imaging module (RIM) and of the resulting processing system on a suitable host are separately discussed. This system accepts a standard video signal and converts it into 128 × 128 pixels at a rate of 50 frames per second. Simultaneous display of the digitised picture is provided. The RIM adopts a shared-memory approach to cope with the speed requirements, thus allowing the system to process both static and dynamic pictures in time-critical environments. It is inexpensive and easily adaptable to different hosts. A sufficient software library has been developed on a host, the EXORCISER, and two applications have been conducted on the system. To facilitate algorithm development, sampled pictures can be up-loaded to a more powerful system, the EXORMACS, which allows the evaluation of recognition algorithms