A teachable pattern describing and recognizing program

Abstract The paper discusses an adaptive pattern recognition program that learns to recognize coded line drawings, and to describe the structure of the pattern by giving the hierarchical organization of its subparts, and the spatial relationships between them. Emphasis is on mechanisms that allow learning (directed by feedback from a human trainer), and on the methods of abstracting, storing, and retrieving chunks of graphic information for use in subsequent pattern recognition and description. Some similarities to the perceptual process in humans are noted.