Building Modular Vision Systems with a Graphical Plugin Environment

With the increasing interest in computer vision for interactive systems, the challenges of the development process involving many researchers are becoming more prominent. Issues like reuse of algorithms, modularity, and distributed processing are getting more important in the endeavor of building complex vision systems. We present a framework that allows independent development of enclosed components and supports interactive optimization of algorithmic parameters in an online fashion. The communication between components is performed nearly without any slow down compared to a monolithic system. Through the modular concept, all components can be flexibly distributed and reused in other application domains. The suitability of the approach is demonstrated with an example system.