A new optimization strategy, Mean Field Annealing, is presented. Its application to MAP restoration of noisy range images is derived and experimentally verified.

ABSTRACT A self-organizing Hopfield network has been developed in the context of Vector Ouantiza -tion, aiming at compression of television images. The metastable states of the spin glass-like network are used as an extra storage resource using the Minimal Overlap learning rule (Krauth and Mezard 1987) to optimize the organization of the attractors. The sel f-organi zi ng scheme that we have devised results in the generation of an adaptive codebook for any qiven TV image. As in many applications they are unknown, the aim of this work is to develop a network capable to learn how to select its attractors. TV image compression using Vector Quantization (V.Q.)(Gray, 1984), a key issue for HOTV transmission, is a typical case, since the non neural algorithms which generate the list of codes (the codebookl are suboptimal.

The operator also produces simultaneous brightness contrast, as expected from the shape and sign of its surround. The output reflectance it computes for a patch of fixed input reflectance decreases linearly with increasing average irradiance of the input test vector in which the patch appears. Similarly, to us, a dark patch appears darker when against a light background than against a dark one.

AAAI is a society devoted to supporting the progress in science, technology and applications of AI. I thought I would use this occasion to share with you some of my thoughts on the recent advances in AI, the insights and theoretical foundations that have emerged out of the past thirty years of stable, sustained, systematic explorations in our field, and the grand challenges motivating the research in our field.

The capabilities for representing and reasoning about three-dimensional (3-D) objects are essential for knowledge-based, 3-D photointerpretation systems that combine domain knowledge with image processing, as demonstrated by 3- D Mosaic and ACRONYM. A practical framework for geometric representation and reasoning must incorporate projections between a two-dimensional (2-D) image and a 3-D scene, shape and surface properties of objects, and geometric and topological relationships between objects. In addition, it should allow easy modification and extension of the system's domain knowledge and be flexible enough to organize its reasoning efficiently to take advantage of the current available knowledge. This system uses frames to represent objects such as buildings and walls, geometric features such as lines and planes, and geometric relationships such as parallel lines.

Kvetoslav "Slava" Prazdny, who died September 19, 1987 in a hang-gliding accident in the California mountains, was recognized internationally as an expert in many aspects of human and machine perception. He had published over 60 articles reporting research in human perception, stereo vision, image processing, robotics, perceptual reasoning and learning, adaptive neural networks, and psychophysics. A redwood tree in Big Basin State Park is dedicated in his memory.

An important task in postal automation technology is determining the position and orientation of the destination address block in the image of a mail piece such as a letter, magazine, or parcel. The corresponding subimage is then presented to a human operator or a machine reader (optical character reader) that can read the zip code and, if necessary, other address information and direct the mail piece to the appropriate sorting bin. Analysis of physical characteristics of mail pieces indicates that in order to automate the address finding task, several different image analysis operations are necessary. Some examples are locating a rectangular white address label on a multicolor background, progressively grouping characters into text lines and text lines into text blocks, eliminating candidate regions by specialized detectors (for example, detecting regions such as postage stamps), and identifying handwritten regions. Described here are several operations, their utility as predicted by statistics of mail piece characteristics, and the results of applying the operations to a task set of mail piece images. A problem-solving architecture based on the blackboard model of problem solving for appropriately invoking the tools and combining their results is described.

The interpretation of images of postal mail pieces is The Vision Group the domain of this investigation. Our efforts have included It is becoming increasingly important for vision researchers the development of various operators for visual data processing in diverse fields to interact, and the Vision Group at SUNY and image segmentation. The invocation of these Buffalo was formed to facilitate that interaction Current routines and the interpretation of the information they return membership includes 25 faculty and 25 students from 10 is determined by a control structure that uses a variant departments (computer science, electrical and computer of relaxation combined with a rule-based methodology.

In A Hanson and E. Riseman (eds.), Computer Vision Systems, pp. 3-26, New York: Academic Press, 1978

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