Vision and action

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 archi tecture of vision systems 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 approaches the Medusa philosophy and the Synthetic approach The resulting framework calls for synthesizing an arti cial vision system by studying vision competences of increasing complexity and at the same time pursuing the integration of the perceptual 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 biological vision Throughout the paper we describe biological ndings that motivate computational arguments which we believe will in uence studies of Computer Vision in the near future The support of the Advanced Research Projects Agency ARPA Order No and the U S Army Topographic Engineering Center under Contract DACA C the National Science Foundation under Grant IRI and the O ce of Naval Research under Contract N is gratefully acknowledged as is the help of Sandy German in preparing this paper Written on the occasion of the th anniversary of the Computer Vision Laboratory at Maryland