Evidence-based pattern-matching relaxation

In its original form the point pattern-matching relaxation scheme of Ranade and Rosenfeld did not easily permit the representation of uncertainty, and it did not exhibit the desirable property that confidence in consistent pairings of features should increase from one iteration to the next. Because the process of pooling intrinsic support with contextual support is essentially a process of evidence combination, it was suggested by Faugeras that the evidence theory of Dempster and Shafer might be an appropriate framework for relaxation labeling. Some of the issues involved in the implementation of such an approach are addressed and results from the domain of object recognition in SAR imagery are presented.