The article describes the use of elementary techniques in computer vision and motion photography for
the analysis of well known experiments in interactive instructional physics laboratories. We
describe a method for the automated tracking of the kinematics of physical objects which involves
the subtraction of orthogonal colors in color space. The aim is to expose undergraduate students to
image processing and its applications in video motion analysis. The straightforward technique is
simple, results in computational speedup compared to an existing method, removes the need for a
laborious repetitive and manual tagging of frames and is generally robust against color variations.
Insight is also presented into the process of thresholding and selecting the correct region out of
the several choice presented in the post-threshold frames. Finally, the approach is illustrated
through a selection of well known mechanics experiments.