Towards ontology-based cognitive vision

This paper details a visual-concept-ontology-driven knowledge acquisition methodology. We propose to use a visual concept ontology to guide experts in the visual description of the objects of their domain (e.g., pollen grain). The proposed knowledge acquisition process results in a knowledge base enabling semantic image interpretation. An important benefit of our approach is that the knowledge acquisition process guided by the ontology leads to a knowledge base close to low-level vision. A visual concept ontology and a dedicated knowledge acquisition tool have been developed and are presented. We propose a generic methodology that is not linked to any application domain. An example shows how the knowledge acquisition model can be applied to the description of pollen grain images.