[bravura]

I am not a vision specialist, but I work around a lot of them.

Look into the OpenCV image processing library. I haven't used it, but it seems to implement a lot of basic functionality to get you off the ground.

If you can't find anything good from the last ten years, then look at Yann LeCun's recent papers. (Google wanted him to be head of research, but he preferred academia.) In particular, investigate his convolutional networks.

The work of Rob Fergus is more applied, and should lead to good recent pointers.

Look for works experimenting with the NORB dataset.