Reflections on active machine vision

The idea to conceive perception as an active approach and the attempt to incorporate this essential aspect into attempts to design algorithms approaches for machine vision has been used as a starting point for considerations. The postulate to provide machine vision systems with the competence to adapt their internal and external imaging parameters has been extended by the postulate that this competence would have to be represented, too, within such systems at a conceptual level. From there, the next step has been to postulate a conceptual representation not only for activities manipulating the parameters of the imaging system, but also to activities which are observable in the system environment. A framework which incorporates these extensions has been outlined. This framework can be related to major components of a systems architecture for understanding visual motion.