A BELIEF MAINTENANCE SCHEME FOR HIERARCHICAL KNOWLEDGE-BASED IMAGE-ANALYSIS SYSTEMS

A variety of belief maintenance schemes for image analysis have been suggested and used to date. In the recent past, several researchers have suggested the use of the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence for representation of belief. This approach appears to be particularly suited for knowledge-based image analysis systems because of its intuitively convincing ways of representing beliefs, support, plausibility, ignorance, dubiety, and a host of other measures that can be used for the purpose of decision making. It also provides a very attractive technique to combine these measures obtained from disparate knowledge sources. In this article, we show how the Dempster-Shafer theoretic concepts of refinement and coarsening can be used to aggregate and propagate evidence in a multi-resolution image analysis system based on a hierarchical knowledge base.