Developing efficient embedded vision applications requires exploring various algorithmic optimization trade-offs and a broad spectrum of hardware architecture choices. This makes navigating the solution space and finding the design points with optimal performance trade-offs a challenge for developers. To help provide a fair baseline comparison, we conducted comprehensive benchmarks of accuracy, run-time, and energy efficiency of a wide range of vision kernels and neural networks on multiple embedded platforms: ARM57 CPU, Nvidia Jetson TX2 GPU and Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA. Each platform utilizes their optimized libraries for vision kernels (OpenCV, VisionWorks and xfOpenCV) and neural networks (OpenCV DNN, TensorRT and Xilinx DPU). For vision kernels, our results show that the GPU achieves an energy/frame reduction ratio of 1.1–3.2 compared to the others for simple kernels. However, for more complicated kernels and complete vision pipelines, the FPGA outperforms the others with energy/frame reduction ratios of 1.2–22.3. For neural networks [Inception-v2 and ResNet-50, ResNet-18, Mobilenet-v2 and SqueezeNet], it shows that the FPGA achieves a speed up of [2.5, 2.1, 2.6, 2.9 and 2.5] and an EDP reduction ratio of [1.5, 1.1, 1.4, 2.4 and 1.7] compared to the GPU FP16 implementations, respectively.