Philosophical and informational-methodological questions of iconics

This paper discusses methodological questions of the determination of information in iconics, embodied in the form of images represented by a spatial-temporal information process. It describes the place of information theory in the study of images at the level of statistical description. It poses and partially answers questions of information matching involving the formation of images and the extraction of information from them (perception). It discusses the general concept of a thesaurus in categorical form involving the perception of images. A conclusion is reached concerning the present level of development of iconics as a new scientific paradigm. (C) 1996 The Optical Society of America.