A method has been developed to reduce large two-dimensional images to significantly smaller feature lists. These feature lists overcome the problem of storing and manipulating large amounts of data. A new artificial neural network using conjugate gradient training methods, operating on sets of feature lists, was successfully trained to determine the presence or absence of wakes in synthetic aperture radar images. A comparison has been made between the different conjugate gradient and steepest-descent training methods and has demonstrated the superiority of the former over the latter.>

An algorithm that computes the best matching of two trees is described. The degree of mismatch, i.e., the distance, is measured in terms of the number of node splitting and merging operations required. The proposed tree distance is a more appropriate measurement of structural defonnation than the tree distance measure in terms of the number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions of tree nodes, as defined in previous studies. An algorithm that uses a divide-and-conquer strategy is presented. The analysis shows that the time complexity is O(NM2) where N and Al are the number of nodes of the two trees, respectively. The algorithm has been implemented on a VAX 11/780.