Re-visiting Ullman's visual routines

实用机器人的梦想，如陪伴老人的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。我和我的学员之前已经提出了理论、算法和系统，成功地展示了这种视觉认知的各种组成能力，但我们还没有把这些部分组合成一个完整的功能系统。S. Ullman在1984年提出的视觉常规是一个古老但有影响力的概念，它似乎为这种整合提供了正确的基础。乌尔曼提出，他称之为视觉程序的过程，由一系列基本操作组成，可能负责计算诸如形状或空间关系之类的质量。一般来说，这些品质对视觉认知很重要。许多人过去曾考虑过这个想法，但收效甚微。我觉得这个想法仍然有价值，也许缺乏进展是由于没有人更新视觉惯例的想法，鉴于目前对视觉和视觉注意力的理解；自1984年以来，我们的认识发生了巨大的变化。本研究将在当前对视觉和视觉注意的理解背景下重新审视视觉例程的概念，重点关注如何扩展我们过去的工作以定义视觉例程的新概念。

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.