What I am looking for is a device which can do some Pattern and Character Recognition in a fast enough manner that it would be considered "Real Time"
Real time in seconds, or real time in milliseconds?
You can also use industrial grade ethernet camera's. (expensive, but high quality)
All targets offer limited Image processing capability. The performance depends mostly on the software.
Since ARM offers platform depended SIMD instructions and other helpful tricks the compiler doesn't use by default.
I've worked on an STM32F407 and a camera (about 150x100 pixels) and this works nice, if you do not expect too much. And if you optimize your code by knowing the limits of the platform and the compiler. I've also seen people run basic image processing algorithms on FPGA's, which can offload the bulk stuff you have to pre-processes your image with. Such as invert, threshold and contrast corrections.
I got 7-segment character recognition working on the stm32f407
