The foundation stone of this field was put in 1982, with the book Vision, by the British psychologist David Marr, publicated after his death. In his book he proposed a computational investigation of processing and representation in human vision systems, establishing a full methodology to achieve it. It is said the foundation stone because it was the first time someone provides a paradigm to understand vision as a information processing task.
Vision research has incresed its number of scientists, centers of research, and specialization fields, during the last 20 years, and it still has a very long way in the future to keep investigating. One of the things I like most of this field is the chance to take advantage of many other different disciplines, using their methodologies, algorithms and ideas to apply them in a day by day wider scope field.
Not only the number of applications of computer vision science is virtually infinite, as everyday new targets are focused by our cameras' lens, but also the ways to achieve the proposed goals grow. As [3] states, pattern recognition, statistical learning, projective geometry, image processing, graph theory are usually the tools to process, represent and understand the visual data. I'd also add psychology, physics, neural networks or artificial intelligence, sometimes known as the super-field vision belongs to.
Some references and links
[1] J.Vitrią. Visió per computador. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1995. ISBN 84-490-0295-8
[2] D.Marr. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. ISBN 0716715678.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision
[4] E.Trucco, A.Verri. Introductory Techniques for 3-D Computer Vision. ISBN 0132611082
[5] M.Born, E.Wolf. Principles of Optics. ISBN 0521639212
[6] R.Jain, R.Kasturi, B.G.Schunck. Machine Vision. ISBN 0070320187
[7] W.Grimson. From Images to Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Vision System. ISBN 0262070839
[8] The computer Vision Homepage
[9] Compendium of Computer Vision
[10] Computer Vision and Image Understanding Journal
[11] The Computer Vision Handbook
[12] Computer Vision Conferences
[13] OpenCV
[14] Morphological image processing applet
[15] R.Hartley, A.Zisserman. Multiple view geometry in computer vision. ISBN 0521-54051-8.