Attributed Grammar—A Tool for Combining Syntactic and Statistical Approaches to Pattern Recognition

Attributed grammars are defined from the pattern recognition point of view and shown to be useful for descriptions of syntactic structures as well as semantic attributes in primitives, subpatterns, and patterns. A pattern analysis system using attributed grammars is proposed for pattern classification and description. This system extracts primitives and their attributes after preprocessing, performs syntax analysis of the resulting pattern representations, computes and extracts subpattern attributes for syntactically accepted patterns, and finally makes decisions according to the Bayes decision rule. Such a system uses a combination of syntactic and statistical pattern recognition techniques, as is demonstrated by illustrative examples and experimental results.