MAVIS: a visual environment for active computer vision

MAVIS is a dataflow visual language for computer vision and image processing. It features a high degree of `liveness´ and compliance with user directives, providing a flexible environment for building and testing vision algorithms. MAVIS includes a number of features intended to support real-time or `active´ vision. Among these are flexible user and program control of communications and scheduling, direct user and program access to all computational and system parameters, and an inherently parallel model of computation that can be readily supported on a variety of computer architectures. This paper describes the goals of the MAVIS project, the design of the language and the status of the implementation