The work described in this publication was initiated at the General Electric Company's Electronics Laboratory, Syracuse, N.Y., U.S.A. The author would like to take this opportunity to express his gratitude to the Electronics Laboratory for its support and encouragement in this work. Thanks are in particular due to Mr. J.J. Suran for his continued interest and help. It is impossible to acknowledge all the help the author has re ceived from members of the Laboratory staff. However, the author is par ticularly indebted to Mr. T.C. Robbins for managing the building of the word recognizer (described in Section 7.4) and for many helpful discussions. Thanks are also due to Mr. W.E. Sollecito for valued support and direction, and to S.M. Korzekwa, S.B. Akers, Jr., and B.L. Crew for many discussions on implementation and design of pattern recognizers. Part of the work has been sponsored by two departments of the General Electric Company, the Large Jet Engine Department and the Apollo Support Department. The author is grateful for the permission from the two departments to publish results of theoretical interest in this dissertation. The work was later continued in Denmark, supported by two grants: no.weiterlesen