Page 15 -

1 Basic Notions

1.1 Object Recognition

Object recognition is a task performed daily by living beings and is inherent to
their ability and necessity to deal with the environment. It is performed in the most
varied circumstances - navigation towards food sources, migration, identification
of predators, identification of mates, etc. - with remarkable efficiency. Recognizing
objects is considered here in a broad cognitive sense and may consist of a very
simple task, like when a micro-organism flees from an environment with
inadequate pH, or refer to tasks demanding non-trivial qualities of inference,
description and interpretation, for instance when a human has to fetch a pair of
scissors from the second drawer of a cupboard, counting from below.
The development of methods capable of emulating the most varied forms of
object recognition has evolved along with the need for building "intelligent"
automated systems, the main trend of today's technology in industry and in other
fields of activity as well. ln these systems objects are represented in a suitable way
for the type of processing they are subject to. Such representations are called
patterns. In what follows we use the words object and pattern interchangeably with
similar meaning.
Pattern Recognition (PR) is the scientific discipline dealing with methods for
object description and classikication. Since the early times of computing the design
and implementation of algorithms emulating the human ability to describe and
classify objects has been found a most intriguing and challenging task. Pattern
recognition is therefore a fertile area of research, with multiple links to many other
disciplines, involving professionals from several areas.
Applications of pattern recognition systems and techniques are numerous and
cover a broad scope of activities. We enumerate only a few examples referring to
several professional activities:

Agriculture:
Crop analysis
Soil evaluation
Astronomy:
Analysis of telescopic images
Automated spectroscopy
Biology:
Automated cytology
Properties of chromosomes
Genetic studies