Expert systems as design aids for artificial vision systems: a survey
Daniel Crevier · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
The development of software that would be to computer vision what expert system shells are to expert systems has been the subject of considerable inquiry over the last ten years; this paper reviews the pertinent publications and tries to present a coherent view of the field. We start by outlining two major differences between would be `vision shells' and conventional expert system shells. The first is the need for an intermediate level of symbolic representation between image pixels and the knowledge base. The second is that the mental operations that people perform to interpret images lie almost totally below the threshold of consciousness. Vision system designers therefore cannot, as domain experts normally do, examine their own mental processes and cast them into rules to extract information from images. The vision shell should thus contain, in addition to the usual knowledge engineering toolbox, knowledge on the pertinence of specific imaging operations towards various goals. After a review of the role of explicit knowledge in artificial vision, we examine the architecture a vision shell should have, and look at ways of facilitating the entry of domain-pertinent knowledge into it. Final remarks are made on knowledge representation and acquisition aspects particular to industrial applications.