Abstract: The apparatus of the present invention for determining existential conditions of objects on a certain detecting region, includes: a temperature distribution detecting section for obtaining a thermal image including a plurality of elements each having temperature data by detecting the temperature distribution on the detecting region; an element classifying section for classifying the plurality of elements in the thermal image into at least two groups, all elements belonging to one of the groups being in a certain temperature range, the temperature range of the one group being distinct from a temperature range of another one of the groups; a group selecting section for selecting at least one group of a relatively higher temperature range in the thermal image from the at least two groups; an element selecting section for selecting, among elements included in the selected group, elements having temperature data indicative of local temperature peaks in the thermal image; and an output section for outputting the nu

Abstract: The fuzzy inference apparatus is provided to effect the tuning operation of the fuzzy inference with the use of the descent steps from the input/output data to be obtained from the specialists, the inputs of the users, and to automatically produce the desired fuzzy inference rules not by the trial and error, whereby the optimum inference rule can be obtained by the descent steps, and the specialists' knowledge and khow-how can be easily mounted on the appliances as the inference rules.

Abstract: An inference conducted by use of fuzzy knowledge can be directly written in inference rules. It is possible to use ambiguous language expressions and freely describe flexible knowledge, although ambiguous, in a knowledge base. The user specifies execution priority orders or conviction degrees of inference rules such that even when an antecedent contains a confirmative or determinant action, a contention between rules is prevented. An intermediate results of a fuzzy inference is passed in a form of a real number or a fuzzy label to the next inference to achieve a fuzzy multi-stage inference. A multi-stage inference conducting a backtrack operation based on fuzzy knowledge is implemented to reflect a user's ambiguous knowledge.