Imaging, Computing, and Human Perception: Three Agents to Usher in the Autonomous Machine Computing Era

Autonomous machines such as drones, robots, and even Augmented and Virtual Reality headsets, while are of a computing nature, intimately interact with both the environment and humans. They must be built, from the ground up, with principled considerations of three main components: imaging system, computer system, and human perception and cognition. While our community has been, for very good reasons, focused almost exclusively on improving the computer systems, our position is that the continued progress in autonomous machine computing (AMC) must rely on co-designing and co-optimizing all three components. We call them, collectively, agents for progress in AMC.