Automatic Abstraction of Information From Digitized Images

A research effort now underway addresses fundamental mathematical issues involved in a methodology of creating flexible machine vision systems that would be able to modify their behaviors and evolve in particular environments so as to recognize anything that human operators have designated as being "interesting" in those environments. It is intended that a person who is not a programmer could train such a machine vision system by drawing lines around objects in a scene (see figure) or otherwise indicating example objects and that thereafter, the system would adapt and evolve the ability to recognize such objects automatically.