(Mis?)-Using DRT for generation of natural language text from image sequences

The abundance of geometric results from image sequence evaluation which is expected to shortly become available creates a new problem: how to present this material to a user without inundating him with unwanted details? A system design which attempts to cope not only with image sequence evaluation, but in addition with an increasing number of abstraction steps required for efficient presentation and inspection of results, appears to become necessary. The system-user interaction of a Computer Vision system should thus be designed as a natural language dialogue, assigned within the overall system at what we call the 'Natural Language Level'. Such a decision requires to construct a series of abstraction steps from geometric evaluation results to natural language text describing the contents of an image sequence. We suggest to use Discourse Representation Theory as developed by [H. Kamp and U. Reyle 93] in order to design the system-internal representation of knowledge and results at the N atural Language Level. A first implementation of this approach and results obtained applying it to image sequences recorded from real world traffic scenes are described.