Image Understanding Architecture and Applications

We describe in this chapter how various image-understanding problems can be mapped onto an architecture and associated implementation specifically designed for such problems. This parallel architecture, which has been funded as part of the DARPA Image Understanding Program, provides a hierarchical, heterogeneous structure to support the wide granularity of processing encountered in the image-understanding domain. In addition, it has an associative capability that allows rapid feedback of global and local summary information to facilitate knowledge-directed processing. We present several applications of this architecture, which span a considerable space of potential use.