UCLA

This thesis describes a research program towards enabling mobile visual agents to successfully solve visual decision problems. We identify perception, information acquisition, and prediction as the three areas to focus on, and develop methods to facilitate these stages, which are then applied to a sample selection of visual tasks. We first focus on segmentation and categorization of objects in video, and propose techniques for doing so. We then describe approaches for information-acquisition, useful whenever the data collection process can be controlled, or when one can choose which data to process. Finally, we describe an approach that leverages video to predict the long term behavior of specific objects of interest.