Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA (Ken Laws) (06/25/86)
I doubt that it makes much difference what inference engine Mark
Nagel uses for his vision problem, as long as it allows calls to
external routines. Since almost the entire vision problem must
be handled by procedural attachment ("conventional image analysis
techniques"), the inference engine need only provide the capabilities
of a simple programming language. A probabilistic or fuzzy-reasoning
system such as Prospector might have considerable advantage over
logic-based approaches, but would have much the same flavor as the
statistical techniques that Mark wishes to avoid.
The real problems in visual pattern recognition are in computing
robust descriptors (esp. if they must be computed quickly) and in
the knowledge-representation (i.e., knowing what kind of descriptors
to compute and how to store the answers). Very little of the problem
has to do with logical reasoning, forward or backward chaining, etc.
-- Ken Laws
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