Queen Jadwiga Foundation

In the previous Chapters, the knowledge implementation was defined in the context of both human learning and machine learning. The knowledge implementation is focused on learning of the knowledge and skills by machine (SUS) and is concerned with two main aspects of human learning: learning of the visual knowledge in the context of the categorical structure of the learned categories of the visual objects and learning of the knowledge that is connected with understanding of the content of the text. As it was described in Chapter 3, SUS operates in two main modes, learning and understanding mode. SUS ability to understand depends on the effectiveness of learning process and learning of the new knowledge depends on SUS ability to understand.

A shape-understanding system (SUS) that is able to perform different tasks of shape analysis and recognition, based on the ability of the system to understand different concepts of shape at the different levels of cognition, is proposed. This system is an implementation of a shape-understanding method. The proposed method of shape understanding is based on the concept of possible classes of shapes. Possible classes of shape are based on shape models and are viewed as a hierarchical structure at different levels of description. At each level of description the different aspects of shape such as geometrical properties of shape, perceptual properties of figure, or meaningful properties of visual form are incorporated in the shape model. The shape-understanding system consists of different types of experts that perform different processing and reasoning tasks. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 19: 949–978, 2004.

In this paper, the method of understanding of visual objects is presented. The main novelty of the presented method is that the process of understanding is related to the visual concept represented as a symbolic name of the possible classes of shapes. The possible classes of shapes, viewed as hierarchical structures, are incorporated into the shape model. At each stage of the reasoning process that led to assigning an examined object to one of the possible classes, novel processing methods are used. An understanding is based on interpretation of the visual object as a meaningful unit. A big advantage of the proposed method of understanding of the visual objects is that it can explain many problems connected with understanding visual forms. In this paper, the selected concept of the method of understanding of the visual objects is discussed in the context of the psychological and philosophical research. This method is implemented as a module of the shape understanding system (SUS) and tested on the broad classes of shapes.