From visual data to multimedia presentations

Image understanding systems which perform a qualitative interpretation of a continuous flow of visual data allow observation of inaccessible areas and will release humans from time-consuming and often boring observation tasks, e.g. in traffic control. Moreover, a sophisticated system may not only collect and condense data but also interpret them in a particular context and provide information that goes far beyond the set of visual input data. Intelligent multimedia generation systems, which employ several media such as text, graphics and animation for the presentation of information, increasingly attract attention in many application areas since they (1) are able to flexibly tailor presentations to a user´s individual needs and style preferences, (2) may use one medium in place of another, and (3) may combine media so that the strength of one medium will overcome the weakness of another. Combining techniques for image understanding and intelligent multimedia generation will open the door to an interesting new type of computer-based information system that provides highly flexible access to the visual world. Such integrated systems will be able to transform visual data into various presentation forms including, for example, TV-style reports and illustrated articles. In this paper, we present the conception of a reporting system and describe a decomposition of the transformation process into maintainable subtasks