Abstract: There are lots of new work and scientific debates on the right appoach to the field of computer vision. Our goal in this paper is to contribute to this debate. We propose our points of view and provide a coherent direction for future work.First we present a brief survey of the Marr frame and the limitation of this philosophy as well. Then we present the purposive directed approach, which includes active vision, animate vision and utilitarian theory of perception in computer vision. We also give some introduction to the attractive research field in each aspects including selective attention mechanism, space variant signal representation and processing,gaze control, study ability and so on. Based on the comparison of these two radically different ideas in computer vision, we propose our view of the research approach in computer vision and point out the important field that much attention should be paid to in the near future.