Achieving generalized object recognition through reasoning about association of function to structure

An attempt is made to demonstrate the feasibility of defining an object category in terms of the functional properties shared by all objects in the category. This form of representation should allow much greater generality. A complete system has been implemented that takes the boundary surface description of a 3D object as its input and attempts to recognize whether the object belongs to the category ´chair´ and, if so, into which subcategory if falls. This is, to the authors´ knowledge, the first implemented system to explore the use of a purely function-based definition of an object category (that is, no explicit geometric or structural model) to recognize 3D objects. System competence has been evaluated on a database of over 100 objects, and the results largely agree with human interpretation of the objects.<>