Abstract
Sight is, without doubt, the most precious and wonderful of the senses. The value of vision to the survival of both people and animals is obvious: food can be located, and a mate or a potential predator can be identified. All of this can be done at a safe distance from the object that is being observed. Detailed information about size, shape, colour and motion can be collected and then integrated with stored data and that derived from other sensors, in order to establish an understanding about the surroundings of the organism. The survival and safety of nearly all of the higher animals is critically dependent upon sight and human beings are no exception. Apart from the basic animal needs to which we have referred, people have come to rely upon vision for a multitude of uses, including manufacturing, navigation, commerce, education, communication, and entertainment. Blindness is so terrible a prospect that most of us would prefer a host of physical disabilities instead. We do not need to emphasise the practical and aesthetic importance of vision, because it is immediately apparent to us all, throughout our everyday lives. From the moment we wake up, to the very last second when we put the lights out before going to sleep at night, we use our eyes.
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Of course, blind people can be very intelligent but there are very many mental processes that are made much easier through the integration of vision and intelligence and which blind people find more difficult than sighted people. This is the point that we wish to make. We do not wish to imply that intelligence cannot exist without vision, since clearly it can.
This raises a semantic question as to what AI is. Many workers regard the answer as essentially the recursive definition that AI is the subject that uses so-called “AI techniques”. In essence, this means that AI is the subject concerned with back-track programming, recursion, list processing, heursitics, rather than algorithms, etc. Lisp, Poplog, Prolog are regarded as essential tools for AI workers to master.
This is no less important for AVI than it is for RV.
It should be noted that it is possible to write a Lisp compiler in Prolog, and a Prolog compiler in Lisp, so there is perhaps less need to justify the choice at the outset. We prefer, instead, to begin by describing Provision, which is a superset of Prolog, and then justify it by demonstrating its power. The author has not found any undue encumbrance as a result of selecting Prolog as the basis for Prolog+. On the contrary, his experience has more than fulfilled the expectations.
Core Prolog is commonly taken to be the version of the language described by Clocksin and Mellish [CLO-81]. It is also referred to as Edinburgh Prolog.
Logic Programming Associates Ltd, Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, Prince Consort Road, London, U.K.
The expert system tool-box which interfaces to MacProlog is called Flex.
The speech synthesis driver software was added by Mr Terry Gritton, 65 Nunes Road, Watsonville, California 95076, U.S.A.
In fact, Autoview and VCS have both been interfaced successfully to Prolog.
For reasons of confidentiality, his identity cannot be revealed.
About $30,000.
The same program can be applied to isolated, touching, overlapping and semi-flexible objects.
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag London
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Batchelor, B.G. (1991). Vision and Intelligence. In: Intelligent Image Processing in Prolog. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0401-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0401-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, London
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