Since the early days of computers, machine learning and automatic programming have attracted researchers in computer science and related fields, particularly pattern recognition and automatic control theory. Most of the learning concepts in machine perception have been inspired by pattern recognition approaches that rely on statistical techniques. These statistical techniques have applicability in limited recognition tasks. Automatic programming in perception systems has generally been limited to interfaces that allow easy specification of the task using natural language. Clearly, machine learning and automatic programming can make percep tion systems powerful and easy to use. Vogt's book addresses both these tasks in the context of machine vision. He uses morphological operations to implement his approach which was developed for solving the figure-ground problem in images. His system selects the correct se quence of operators to accept or reject pixels for fmding objects in an image. The sequence of operators is selected after a user specifies what the correct objects are. On the surface it may appear that the problem solved by the system is not very interesting, however, the contribution ofVogt' s work should not be judged by the images that the system can segment. Its real contribution is in demonstrat ing, possibly for'the frrst time, that automatic programming is possible in computer vision systems. The selection of morphological operators demonstrates that to implement an automatic programming-based approach, operators whose behavior is clearly defined in the image space are required.
