Introduction

Abstract

This chapter will introduce basic high-level concepts and methodologies involved in the field of object recognition. We begin with a discussion on what constitutes computer vision and detail the background and history of this area. Various paradigms that have influenced system development will be outlined and existing systems classified accordingly. The second section of the introduction will narrow its scope to deal specifically with object recognition. At this stage application-specific terminology and a mathematical formulation of the problem are provided. The general requirements, as well as the assumptions that are often made, in an object recognition system will then be detailed. The motivations behind the development of two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) object recognition systems are discussed and an overview of the various acquisition modes for the inputting of data in object recognition systems are provided. The chapter then concludes with a taxonomy of the remainder of the book.