Where to Look Next Using a Bayes Net: Incorporating Geometric Relations

A task-oriented system is one that performs the minimum effort necessary to solve a specified task. Depending on the task, the system decides which information to gather, which operators to use at which resolution, and where to apply them. We have been developing the basic framework of a task-oriented computer vision system, called TEA, that uses Bayes nets and a maximum expected utility decision rule. In this paper we present a method for incorporating geometric relations into a Bayes net, and then show how relational knowledge and evidence enables a task-oriented system to restrict visual processing to particular areas of a scene by making camera movements and by only processing a portion of the data in an image.