Knowledge engineering for image processing

Pantheon is a global project, which is mainly concerned with the conception of a knowledge-based system that automatically generates image processing softwares.

Such a system provides end-users who are not skilled in image processing with a tool that can compose their own image processing software. End-users describe an application thanks to a graphical user interface, and the system generates a convenient executable program.

The scope of available applications is restricted to image-to-image transforms without any interpretation of the image content. If needed the image processing application should be extracted from the global application that embodied it.

The objective of this project is deliberately naive. It makes sense only for defining the scope of our researches. The conception of the system is just a pretext for a detailled study of the image processing knowledge and for its operationnalization.

Hermès is a human-machine interface that allows a user, inexperienced in the image processing field, to formulate the application he needs to transform his images. This interface is a pretext for studying the image processing knowledge involved in the realization of such applications (objective of the Pantheon Project). We formalize this knowledge through ontologies for its operationalization. Two ontologies are under development : an ontology of image processing which permits the communication between Hermès and Prométhée which is a planification system for image processing tasks; an ontology for the user which identifies and organizes the concepts needed by the user to formulate his application. Hermès translates the user's formulation into image processing terms and make a request (the image processing formulation of the application) which is sent to the planification system. This system constructs a processing plan and responds to the request by the resulting images of this plan. Hermès gets back these images and presents them to the user for their evaluation. When results are validated by the user, the software that suits user's requirements is given by the planification system.