OpenVL: A task-based abstraction for developer-friendly computer vision

Research into computer vision techniques has far outpaced the development of interfaces (such as APIs) to support the techniques´ accessibility, especially to developers who are not experts in the field. We present a new description-based interface designed to be mainstream-developer-friendly while retaining sufficient power and flexibility to solve a wide variety of computer vision problems. The interface presents vision at the task level (hiding algorithmic detail) and uses a task-based description derived from definitions of vision problems. We show that after interpretation, the description can be used to invoke an appropriate method to provide the developer´s requested result. Our implementation interprets the description and invokes various vision methods with automatically derived parameters, which we demonstrate on a range of tasks.