Scene Labeling by Relaxation Operations

Given a set of objects in a scene whose identifications are ambiguous, it is often possible to use relationships among the objects to reduce or eliminate the ambiguity. A striking example of this approach was given by Waltz 13. This paper formulates the ambiguity-reduction process in terms of iterated parallel operations (i.e., relaxation operations) performed on an array of (object, identification) data. Several different models of the process are developed, convergence properties of these models are established, and simple examples are given.