If you want to do computer vision, you MUST look at roborealm (
www.roborealm.com). Its a free robotics vision system, which is very capable and extremely user friendly. Sometimes it often feels like I'm using professional machine vision tools with it. Only a handful of things it can do right now is detect edges, track blobs, detect skin tones, detect movement, and recognize shapes. But thats just all the stuff it can do without even trying. It's capable of doing lots a vision stuff for robots.