Over the past thirty years, technical means to record, digitize, store, process, and present vide o image sequences have multiplied in capacity by sever al orders of magnitude. This large quantitative improvement is about to turn into a qualitative change regarding the research to be pursued within this area in the future. Whereas up to now an exploratory type of approach has prevailed, the increasingly available technical means for image sequence evaluation facilitate the investigation of large amounts of data. This requires to build encompassing systems and to study their behavior which in turn is expected to stimulate theoretical developments: even small effects of an assumption can be studied in detail within a system environment, thereby enabling stepwise improvements of theoretical approaches underlying the construction of system solutions. The following discussion will emphasize fundamental experimental and theoretical advances rather than details of particular approaches.