Similarity-based perceptual reasoning for perceptual computing

Perceptual reasoning (PR) is an approximate reasoning method that can be used as a computing with words (CWW) engine in perceptual computing. There can be different approaches to implement PR, e.g., PR using firing intervals is proposed in [8], [9], [16], and similarity-based PR is proposed in this paper. Both approaches satisfy the constraint on a CWW engine, i.e., the result of combining fired rules should lead to a footprint of uncertainty (FOU) that resembles the three kinds of FOUs in a CWW codebook. A comparative study shows that the output FOUs from similarity-based PR more closely resemble the three kinds of FOUs in a codebook, and the resulting linguistic descriptions are more intuitive; so, similarity-based PR is a better choice for a CWW engine.