Mac, eat your heart out!
Behold! It turns out that if you start with the proper background knowledge, this sort of thing is trivial, but no one seems to know where to begin learning about stuff like this.
Also, I’m going to be mentoring a high school robotics team this summer! Whee! I’m apparently going to be doing stuff on the software/vision side of things. They have really nice equipment, including a CMUCam2. It turns out that a $30,000 budget can buy a lot of neat toys.