Re-visiting Ullman's visual routines

有用的机器人的梦想，如老年人的伴侣机器人或自动驾驶汽车，需要在视觉认知的计算实现方面取得重大进展。我和我的学员以前提出的理论，算法和系统，成功地证明了各种各样的组件功能，这种视觉认知，但我们还没有把这些碎片放在一起成为一个完整的功能系统。视觉常规是一个古老但有影响力的概念，由S。Ullman在1984年的研究似乎为这种整合提供了正确的基础。厄尔曼认为，一个他称之为视觉程序的过程，由一系列基本操作组成，可以负责计算形状或空间关系等质量。这些品质对于一般的视觉认知是重要的。许多人在过去研究过这个想法，但成功有限。我认为这个想法仍然有价值，也许缺乏进展是由于考虑到目前对视觉和视觉注意力的理解，还没有人更新视觉惯例的想法;自1984年以来，我们的理解发生了很大变化。拟议中的研究将重新审视视觉惯例的想法在当前的视觉和视觉注意力的理解的背景下，专注于我们过去的工作可能会被扩展到定义一个新的概念化的视觉惯例。

The dream of useful robots, such as companion robots for the elderly or autonomous automobiles, requires major advances in the computational realization of visual cognition. I and my trainees have previously presented theory, algorithms and systems that successfully demonstrate a wide variety of the component capabilities of such visual cognition, but we have not yet put the pieces together into a whole functioning system. An old but influential concept, the visual routine suggested by S. Ullman in 1984 seems to present the right foundation for this integration. Ullman suggested that a process he called a visual routine, composed of sequences of elemental operations could be responsible for computing qualities such as shape or spatial relations. Such qualities are important for visual cognition in general. Many have looked at this idea in the past but with limited success. I feel the idea continues to have merit and that perhaps the lack of progress is due to the fact that no one has yet updated the visual routines idea given a current understanding of vision and visual attention; a vast amount has changed in our understanding since 1984. The proposed research will re-visit the visual routines idea in the context of a current understanding of vision and visual attention, focussing on how our past work may be extended to define a new conceptualization of visual routines.