So I spent my time today exploring NASA Vision Workbench, thanks to my friend Chris who pointed me in the right direction.
NASA Vision Workbench is an Open Source C++ Vision framework. It does not contain any vision algorithms but it does contain the basic framework to write them. It also has a fairly nicely written set of documentation. (Occasionally I feel that my tax dollars go to a good use. This happens to be one of those times.)
Chris had some unkind words about OpenCV, as did another friend and the NASA Vision Workbench documentation. Apparently it is held in less than stellar light, so moving to NVW is probably a good thing.
After finding NVW and exploring a bit of the documentation, I began the installation process. I also started reading up on C++ and Boost as it seems that a large number of the vision projects prefer to work in C++ rather than C. I figured actually taking the time to learn C++ properly might be truly useful later in life so I thought I would start now (my first computer science course was supposed to be C++ but it was actually C).
I finally got everything to work using Eclipse’s CDT plugin (which has definitely gotten alot better). Tomorrow I plan to explore for more interesting machine vision problems.