Distinguishing between side-by-side liquid streams I'm new to computer vision and am looking for advice. I'd like to perform computer vision on a spiral system, in this system a down flowing liquid separates into different regions based on density:



The regions can be visually distinguished based on colour. What I'm hoping to do is automatically detect changes in the average colour of each region, width of each region and perhaps total breakdown of regions.

Could you please suggest which techniques of computer vision would be best for this type of analysis? and would you suggest an approach using Matlab or python + library (any)?
I would suggest looking into standard methods for image processing.  You could use the Hough transform to detect circles.  You could potentially use morphological transforms and the watershed algorithm to smooth out and remove noise and detect boundaries between the regions.