Computer vision solutions used to be very specific and difficult to adapt to different or even unforeseen situations. The current development is calling for simple to use yet robust applications that could be employed in various situations. This trend requires the reassessment of some theoretical issues in computer vision. A better general understanding of vision processes, new insights and better theories are needed. The papers selected from the conference staged in Dagstuhl in 1996 to gather scientists from the West and the former eastern-block countries address these goals and cover such fields as 2D images (scale space, morphology, segmentation, neural networks, Hough transform, texture, pyramids), recovery of 3-D structure (shape from shading, optical flow, 3-D object recognition) and how vision is integrated into a larger task-driven framework (hand-eye calibration, navigation, perception-action cycle).
