High-Level Vision

In this book, Shimon Ullman focuses on the processes of high-level vision that deal
with the interpretation and use of what is seen in the image. In particular, he examines two major
problems. The first, object recognition and classification, involves recognizing objects despite
large variations in appearance caused by changes in viewing position, illumination, occlusion, and
object shape. The second, visual cognition, involves the extraction of shape properties and spatial
relations in the course of performing visual tasks such as object manipulation, planning movements
in the environment, or interpreting graphical material such as diagrams, graphs and
maps.

The book first takes up object recognition and develops a novel approach to
the recognition of three-dimensional objects. It then studies a number of related issues in
high-level vision, including object classification, scene segmentation, and visual cognition. Using
computational considerations discussed throughout the book, along with psychophysical and biological
data, the final chapter proposes a model for the general flow of information in the visual
cortex.

Understanding vision is a key problem in the brain sciences, human
cognition, and artificial intelligence. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the theories
developed in this work, High-Level Vision will be of interest to readers in all three of these
fields.