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The formulation of afront-end or“early vision” system is addressed, and its connection with scale-space is shown. A front-end vision system is designed to establish a convenient format of some sampled scalar field, which is suited for postprocessing by various dedicated routines. The emphasis is on the motivations and implications of symmetries of the environment; they pose natural, a priori constraints on the design of a front-end.

The focus is on static images, defined on a multidimensional spatial domain, for which it is assumed that there are no a priori preferred points, directions, or scales. In addition, the front-end is required to be linear. These requirements are independent of any particular image geometry and express the front-end's pure syntactical, “bottom up” nature.

It is shown that these symmetries suffice to establish the functionality properties of a front-end. For each location in the …