If you have a licensed Visual Studio, OpenCV is not difficult to learn. I have seen four final year undergraduate students who have successfully used OpenCV to do projects related to object detection, such as, finger detection, face detection, and vehicle detection.
Alternatively, SDK for Kinect is powerful and free as well. It can work with Visual Studio, or even LabVIEW. In fact, LabVIEW has a vision development toolkit. Please see the following link for more information. LabVIEW is definitely not cheap.
If you need a specific remote sensing software with a large number of image libraries implemented, I recommend you ENVI. This software include the IDL (language programming) that includes a lot of image processing function (ENVI software is developed using IDL).
I agree with Jorge suggestion. The coupled use of ENVI and IDL offers the best framework for a remote sensing programmer. Of course, at a cost.
If you are looking for a free software solution you can rely on Python-OpenCV but you will have to handle a lot of basic routines yourself and you will likely be left with less time to do your work.
I guess you are interest to do remote sensing data analysis then you can use GRASS a free and open source software if not openCV or Matlab can be used.