DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING NETWORK

A dynamic programming network integrating sensor management, sensor fusion, and an application in a seamless structure in which these functions are mutually dependent and develop autonomously and concomitantly with experience. The dynamic programming network autonomously divides these functions into multiple subtasks that it can assign to the processors of a fine-grained parallel computer. As the number of processors available for these subtasks increases the network may attain its objective more efficiently. This architecture confers the greatest advantage in feature-rich applications such as identification of targets in synthetic aperture radar, visual, and infrared images. The design can be extended, however, to such diverse and general applications as control problems and machine intelligence. For the pattern recognition applications, the dynamic programming network detects, selects, and identifies features and patterns comprising those features via a series of observations rather than processing all data available in each image, thereby minimizing sensor usage and volume of data processed. The network remembers similar features contained in many images instead of many images containing similar features, thus conserving memory and facilitating data retrieval.