Describing and abstracting pictorial structures

Abstract

As part of a research program concerned with the nature of descriptive representations of photographic material, it was necessary to obtain answers to questions concerned with the state-of-the-art in indexing and describing pictorial data. In addition to a discussion of the nature and use of pictorial description, three main classes of formal description are surveyed and evaluated: the grammar-based approach, which uses a set of rules to describe the arrangement and relationships among the picture primitives; the descriptor-based approach, which captures the content of the picture by using a number of terms or phrases; and the procedure-based approach, in which a system (possibly grammar-based) capable of generating a large number of descriptions, is coupled to a high-level control mechanism which selects procedures and order of procedures so as to produce only a single desired description.