A General Description of the Fundamental Ideas Behind Automatic Image Understanding

Abstract

In this chapter we shall try to explain what automatic image understanding is and how we can force the computer to understand the image content. Before we get down to details we must demonstrate that there is in fact a fundamental difference between a formal description of an image (typically obtained by means of a variety of computer viewing methods) and the content meaning of the image, which can be discovered by an intelligent entity, capable of understanding the profound sense of the image in question. Although the problem under consideration is rather serious, we shall now use a joke to show how weak traditional computer vision technology can be in applications in which image understanding is the bottleneck of the proper solution.