We are addressing two aspects of vision-based system development that are not fully exploited in current frameworks: abstraction over low-level details and high-level module reusability. Through an evaluation of existing frameworks, we relate these shortcomings to the lack of systematic classification of sub-tasks in vision-based system development. In this paper we present our work-in-progress which addresses these two issues by classifying vision into decoupled sub-tasks, hence defining a clear scope for a vision-based system development framework and its sub-components. Firstly, we decompose the task of vision system development into data management and processing. We then proceed to further decompose data management into three components: data access, conversion and transportation. We present the Vision Utility (VU) framework which provides abstraction over the vision system data management and verify this approach through an example vision system.

Presented at the Workshop on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval at the International Symposium on Multimedia in San Diego, December 2009.