Hierarchical Constraint Processes for Shape Analysis

A major application of syntactic pattern recognition is the analysis of two-dimensional shape. This paper describes a new syntactic shape analysis technique which combines the constraint propagation techniques which have been so successful in computer vision with the syntactic representation techniques which have been successfully applied to a wide variety of shape analysis problems. Shapes are modeled by stratified shape grammars. These grammars are designed so that local constraints can be compiled from the grammar describing the appearance of pieces of shape at various levels of description. Applications to the analysis of airplane shapes are presented.