VDI — A Visual Debugging Interface for Image Interpretation

Higher-level image interpretation systems typically consist of many tightly-coupled modules, each related to a particular aspect of the interpretation task. When such a system produces wrong results, programmers generally spend a lot of time writing special-purpose display routines to facilitate investigating the problem. This paper presents an attempt at unifying such efforts by merging graphics programming with debugging technology. Several generalizations are necessary to provide useful general-purpose display mechanisms: 1) The mechanisms need to be highly interactive such that programmers can select and change display preferences at debugging time. 2) The display routines should not be restricted to traditional, two-dimensional images. 3) The programmer must be able to visualize the data- dependent relationships between modules. VDI is a general-purpose Visual Debugging Interface designed to provide these generalizations. It is highly interactive, operates on arrays of arbitrary dimensionality, and provides mechanisms to describe dependencies between the results generated by various interdependent modules.