All CPUs are limited. If you get a bigger camera or a faster camera, you will overwhelm even a XEON monster with the data that it can produce. The cRIO is perfectly capable of processing images for this year's challenge, provided you use it appropriately.
A cRIO shouldn't crash doing image processing, and I'll hook mine up to see if I can reproduce it. You may want to verify that you have this year's cRIO image installed, and if you don't mind a few more experiments, can you change the two Boolean true's to false to see if one of those is responsible for it?
Greg McKaskle