Re-visiting Ullman's visual routines

有用的机器人的梦想，如老年人的同伴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。我和我的受训者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部分的能力，但我们还没有把这些部件组合成一个完整的功能系统。这是一个古老但有影响力的概念，S.Ullman在1984年提出的视觉惯例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，可以负责计算形状或空间关系等质量。一般而言，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，也许缺乏进展是因为根据目前对视觉和视觉注意力的理解，还没有人更新视觉例程的想法；自1984年以来，我们的理解发生了很大的变化。这项拟议的研究将在当前对视觉和视觉注意的理解的背景下重新审视视觉例程的想法，重点放在我们过去的工作如何扩展以定义视觉例程的新概念化。 对于人类和机器人来说，视觉感知的作用不是简单地对单一图像进行分类。它是为了能够理解物理世界，并指导那个世界内的行动和操纵。如果不能对所看到的东西进行视觉推理，这一目标就无法实现。拟议的研究将有助于实现这一目标，并将在我的实验室的视觉引导机器人上进行测试。这一领域的进步不仅将拉近老年人伴侣机器人或自动驾驶汽车的梦想，还将有助于开发更有用的视觉监控系统，或在制造环境中安全地与人类互动的机器人，以及其他应用。

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. The role of visual perception, for both humans and robots, is not to simply categorize single images. It is to enable an understanding of the physical world and to guide action and manipulation within that world. Without the ability to visually reason about what is seen, this goal cannot be realized. The proposed research will contribute to this goal and will be tested on my lab's visually-guided robots. Not only would advances in this area bring closer the dream of companion robots for the elderly or autonomous automobiles, but they would also contribute to more useful visual surveillance systems or to robots that may safely interact with humans in manufacturing settings, among other applications.