Very interesting, tester.
It is always good to find an example of real scientific exploration so accessible to the "amateur" - the tools can be cheap enough so that one does not need to seek approval from the established formal bodies with their dogmatic ideas of what is good to study.
From a technical sense...
Yes, I think even with the standard FS tools this could be done - it would not be very fast, I think, but in this case the accuracy of unmasking the small fluctuations from the camera shot noise is the primary requirement.
The R,G,B colour information for a pixel can be found using the 'Get Pixel' primitive for any loaded image, and the "Set Pixel" could be used to construct the output bitmap - thus making a crude "array reader" and "array writer" for the pixel colour information which can be scanned using integer loops.
Here's a quick example that creates a btmap which shows the colour difference between two source bitmaps...
For other processes, only the "PROCESS" module would require changing - though it would become quite a complex module when it becomes necessary to extract the values of surrounding pixels - e.g. for creating blur or edge detection.
I tried this with some larger bitmaps - approx.2000*3000px - and it seems to work fine, though as predicted, it is rather slow (about 1 minute per image on my little laptop).
(PS - don't worry about the error boxes at startup; the stock bitmap display doesn't like empty bitmaps - the error will go away when you load something.)