Computer vision systems are based on capture and processing of images, from which information for the application is extracted. This paper presents a hybrid platform which can be easily configured and efficiently used for a large number of applications in computer vision. It consists of a dedicated processor integrated to the capture element, connected to a general-purpose computer for the highlevel application processing. The camera module consists of a DSP executing a middleware which provides all the basic functions, such as image capture, low-level image processing, control, and communication. Experiments showed that good performance is obtained with this platform, and the framework presented may simplify the development of computer vision systems. An application for the hardware-software architecture presented here would be the validation and prototyping of computer vision systems.