Here's an idea - instead of assuming I'm being lazy and looking for a magic bullet why don't you consider this: I think this QR code thing might be a great example of a tractable, relatively small problem that lets me sink my teeth into the computer vision stuff that usually is presented in a very abstract way.

In order to do that efficiently, a nice annotated codebase would help a lot. So back to the question:

Do you know of any such codebases?