Innovative modelling techniques in computer vision

The paper is concerned with two of main research activities currently carried on at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab of DIE. The first part deals with hybrid artificial vision models, intended to provide object recognition and classification capabilities to an autonomous intelligen system. In this framework, a system recovering 3-D shape information from grey-level images of a scene, building a geometric representation of the scene in terms of superquadrics at the geometric level, and reasoning about the scene at the symbolic level is described. In the second part, attention is focused on automatic indexing of image databases. JACOB, a prototypal system allowing for the automatic extraction from images of salient features like colour and texture, and for content-based browsing and querying in image and video databases is briefly described.