Successive Refinement for Pattern Recognition

In this paper we examine the achievable rate region for the problem of successive refinement of information for pattern recognition systems. The pattern recognition system has two stages, going from coarse to fine recognition as more resources become available for storing internal representations of the patterns. We present an inner and an outer bound on the true achievable rate region. Using these results we derive conditions under which a pattern recognition system is successively refinable. These conditions are similar to the Markov condition for successive refinement in the rate-distortion problem.