Integrating Subsymbolic and Symbolic Processing in Artificial Vision

Abstract

We approach the integration between symbolic and subsymbolic processing within a hybrid model of visual perception, intended for an autonomous intelligent system. No hypotheses are made about the adequacy of this model as a model of human vision: the proposed model is currently under development for a robot system. We propose an associative mapping mechanism, that relates the constructs of the symbolic representation to a geometric representation of the observed scene. The symbolic representation is expressed in terms of a formalism provided with compositional structure. The geometric representation is obtained by making use of a geometric modelling system based on superquadrics. We describe a possible realization of the mapping mechanism by means of a feed-forward neural network architecture based on the backpropagation rule, presenting some results of a partial implementation.