In this paper, Bayesian networks of Markov random fields (BN-MRFs) are proposed as a technique for representing and applying apriori knowledge at different abstraction levels inside a distributed image processing framework. It is shown that this approach, thanks to the common probabilistic basis of the two techniques, is able to combine in a natural way causal inference properties at different abstraction levels as provided by Bayesian networks with optimisation criteria usually applied to find the best configuration for an MRF. Examples of two-level BN-MRFs are given, where each node uses a coupled Markov random field which has to solve a coupled restoration and segmentation problem. Experiments are concerned with expert-driven registered segmentation and tracking of regions from image sequences.