Understanding as an interpretation in a shape understanding system

Abstract

In this paper, the method of understanding of visual objects is presented. The main novelty of the presented method is that the process of understanding is related to the visual concept represented as a symbolic name of the possible classes of shapes. The possible classes of shapes, viewed as hierarchical structures, are incorporated into the shape model. At each stage of the reasoning process that led to assigning an examined object to one of the possible classes, novel processing methods are used. An understanding is based on interpretation of the visual object as a meaningful unit. A big advantage of the proposed method of understanding of the visual objects is that it can explain many problems connected with understanding visual forms. In this paper, the selected concept of the method of understanding of the visual objects is discussed in the context of the psychological and philosophical research. This method is implemented as a module of the shape understanding system (SUS) and tested on the broad classes of shapes.