Computational Imagery

Abstract

Reasoning with diagrams has long been a topic of interest among psychologists and philosophers. Diagrammatic representations are important for both the storage and communication of information, whether they are stored externally, such as a pictorial representation on paper, or internally in the form of a mental image. Recently, researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have also been considering how diagrams can be used in computational approaches to reasoning and problem solving. This article considers diagrammatic or imagery-based reasoning primarily from the computational perspective. In particular, we consider the issues of representation, reasoning and applications in the context of problem solving with images. As this is a relatively new area of research in AI, there is not yet an agreed upon underlying theory or standard approach for problem solving with images. Therefore, this article presents an overview of various approaches to this form of reasoning along with a description of various applications.