ABSTRACT
As we move beyond having a computer read magnetic tapes to having it read hand-printed characters or analyze biomedical photographs, we move from the problem of sensing the data to the much more difficult problem of interpreting the data Psychological and physiological studies have investigated animal perception, but they have not led to an understanding thorough enough to enable our duplicating their performance with a computer. Challenging and difficult as the problem is, one of the current artificial intelligence (Al) technologies—statistical pattern recognition and classification theory—which developed as a branch of mathematical statistics in the past few decades, has made tackling this difficult task possible, and has been widely applied to the engineering and the medical sciences.
