Abstract. Experimenting and building integrated, operational systems in computational vision poses both theoretical and practical challenges, involving methodologies from control theory, statistics, optimization, computer graphics, and interaction. Consequently, a control and communication structure is needed to model typical computer vision applications and a flexible architecture is necessary to combine the above mentioned methodologies in an effective implementation. In this paper, we propose a three-layer computer vision framework that offers: a) an application model able to cover a large class of vision applications; b) an architecture that maps this model to modular, flexible and extensible components by means of object-oriented and dataflow mechanisms; and c) a concrete software implementation of the above that allows construction of interactive vision applications. We illustrate how a variety of vision techniques and approaches can be modeled by the proposed framework and we...