A modular object oriented image understanding environment

The architecture of an image understanding environment is presented. The use of object-oriented programming (OOP) principles in its design and programming constructs is described. It is based upon a small number of components that have been found useful in previous environments and stresses the use of OOP principles. The inheritance mechanisms associated with OOP provide an extendable hierarchy of image understanding objects. This allows the common operations over a class of object to be cleanly expressed. Another feature of OOP, encapsulation, allows the hiding of the implementation of a particular object with respect to its interactions with other objects.>