Interpreting a dynamic and uncertain world: High-level vision

When interpreting a dynamic and uncertain world it is important to have a high-level vision component that can guide the reasoning of the whole vision system. This guidance is provided by an attentional mechanism that exploits knowledge of the specific problem being solved. Here we survey work relevant to the development of such an attentional mechanism, using surveillance as an application domain to tie together issues of spatial representation, events, behaviour, control and planning. The paper culminates in a brief description of HIVIS-WATCHER a program that makes use of all these areas.