There are many (good!) reasons to learn about computer vision. But, if nothing else, it makes for a good opportunity to develop/hone your programming skills. It's also cheap (say, using a webcam and a Raspberry Pi), as far as hardware is concerned. And, it's a fun way of interacting with the physical world.
Getting started is straight forward: choose a programming language and pick a library that encapsulates the low-level functionality such as, for example, configuring the USB interface (if using a webcam), reading images/video files (if working directly with vision data), etc. For us, the language choice we typically recommend is Python, and OpenCV for the library.
Installing the library on the latest version (as of the day of this writing) of the Raspbian Operating System (codename stretch) takes only a few steps:
Then, it's only a matter of going through the examples to get acquainted, and choosing a project to start learning/applying your programming skills. There are fantastic resources online for helping you along the way, but we highly recommend:
