Hybrid architecture for shape reconstruction and object recognition

The proposed architecture is aimed to recover 3-D shape information from gray-level images of a scene: to build a geometric representation of the scene in terms of geometric primitives; and to reason about the scene. The novelty of the architecture is in fact the integration of different approaches: symbolic reasoning techniques typical of knowledge representation in artificial intelligence, algorithmic capabilities typical of artificial vision schemes, and analogue techniques typical of artificial neural networks. Experimental results obtained by means of an implemented version of the proposed architecture acting on real scene images are reported to illustrate the system capabilities. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.