Vision and Action

Abstract

(Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-722) Our work on Active Vision has recently focused on the

computational modelling of navigational tasks, where our investigations were guided by the idea of approaching vision for behavioral systems in form of modules that are directly related to perceptual tasks. These studies led us to branch in various directions and inquire into the problems that have to be addressed in order to obtain an overall understanding of perceptual systems. In this paper we present our views about the architecture of vision syst ems, about how to tackle the design and analysis of perceptual systems, and promising future research directions. Our suggested approach for understanding behavioral vision to realize the relationship of perception and action builds on two earlier approac hes, the Medusa philosophy 13] and the Synthetic approach [15 The resulting framework calls for synthesizing an artificial vision system by studying vision corr petences of increasing complexity and at the same time pursuing the integration of the percept ual components with action and learning modules. We expect that Computer Vision research in the future will progress in tight collaboration with many other disciplines that are concerned with empirical approaches to vision, i.e. the understanding of biolo gical vision. Throughout the paper we describe biological findings that motivate computational arguments which we believe will influence studies of Computer Vision in the near future.