Machine Understanding

Book excerpt: This unique book discusses machine understanding (MU). This new branch of classic machine perception research focuses on perception that leads to understanding and is based on the categories of sensory objects. In this approach the visual and non-visual knowledge, in the form of visual and non-visual concepts, is used in the complex reasoning process that leads to understanding. The book presents selected new concepts, such as perceptual transformations, within the machine understanding framework, and uses perceptual transformations to solve perceptual problems (visual intelligence tests) during understanding, where understanding is regarded as an ability to solve complex visual problems described in the authors’ previous books. Thanks to the uniqueness of the research topics covered, the book appeals to researchers from a wide range of disciplines, especially computer science, cognitive science and philosophy.