STRUCTURAL PATTERN RECOGNITION: PRIMITIVES AND JUXTAPOSITION RELATIONS**This work was supported by NSF Grant GK-13-622.

This chapter discusses structural pattern recognition, which includes recognition of objects in photographs through their silhouettes, certain types of wave-forms and all thin line pictures.

Abstract

This chapter discusses structural pattern recognition. Research in pattern recognition deals usually either with the general classification techniques or with techniques strongly dependent on specific applications as typewritten character recognition, chromosome classification, etc. The major exception to this trend is linguistic methods dealing with picture processing. This includes printed or handwritten text, many biomedical pictures, recognition of objects in photographs through their silhouettes, certain types of wave-forms and all thin line pictures. It does not include recognition of faces in photographs or other similarly complex tasks. It is probably too optimistic to expect that mathematical techniques developed for other applications will provide a solution to the problem of shape recognition. The main effort will be to show how such pictures can be expressed in terms of simpler pictures and the juxtaposition relations of the latter. The end result will be a labeled graph. Further analysis of the graph can be made in a number of ways which will depend mostly on the specific problem. The chapter discusses the general features of approach and its connection to other methods rather than the analytical details involved.