Shape understanding system: Understanding the thin object

This paper presents the method of understanding objects that can be considered as thin objects. The proposed method of understanding thin objects is part of the shape understanding method developed by the author. The main novelty of the presented method is that the process of understanding thin objects is related to the visual concept represented as a symbolic name of the possible class of shapes. The possible classes of shape, viewed as hierarchical structures, are incorporated into the shape model. At each stage of the reasoning process that led to assigning of an examined object to one of the possible classes, novel processing methods are used. These methods are very efficient because they deal with a very specific class of shapes. In this paper, the 2-D objects that are classified as thin objects are regarded as geometrical objects without any reference to the real world objects. However, the shape under standing method is designed to understand an object at many levels of interpretation, such as the topological level, the linguistic level and the real world reference level. This approach influences the way in which the system of shape understanding is designed. The system consists of different types of experts that perform different processing and reasoning tasks.