Making structural pattern recognition tractable by local inhibition

Declarative knowledge and control decisions on the sequence of interpretation acts are separated in a structural pattern recognition system. The control can be optimized leaving the knowledge fixed. A simple production system is used as declarative example knowledge. It is tailored to recognize and locate rectangles in images - where object primitives are several thousand very short contour segments. Different control strategies can be realized: (i) a simple quality driven bottom-up control; (ii) an heuristic strategy punishing object instances which have been partner in an already performed reduction and (iii) a new psychologically inspired strategy that combines local inhibition with less local excitation. These strategies are compared quantitatively on synthetic data and qualitatively on a real aerial image.