Building modular vision systems with a graphical plugin environment

With the increasing interest in computer vision for inter-active 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 compo-nents and supports interactive optimization of algorithmic parameters in an online fashion. The communication be-tween components is performed nearly without any slow down compared to a monolithic system. Through the modu-lar concept, all components can be flexibly distributed and reused in other application domains. The suitability of the approach is demonstrated with an example system.