Unstructured control and communication processes in real world scene analysis

This report summarizes research results from a program directed toward developing scene-analysis technology to deal with the problems of scene-analysis organization, control, and low-level feature extraction. The work on organization and control has concentrated on the use of a production system framework. To understand the limitations of production systems in buildings scene-analysis systems, both a high-level and low-level vision system were implemented. The performance of these systems is described in terms of ease of modification, ease of programming, and ability to embed appropriate domain-dependent knowledge. Several low-level feature-extraction techniques have also been developed concurrently on this program. These include an evaluation of edge operators, use of texture statistics, a glancing operator based on texture properties, and a representation for range motion. A summary is included that places these results in perspective with current work in scene analysis.