This paper describes a novel neural network (NN) based system for defe
cting rigid objects from their (2-D) gray-level image images. In this
approach a labeled graph is employed to construct a template model for
an object from the image region where the object is located A novel n
etwork of NN (NoNN) is proposed to learn the examples of object model
graph templates. The NoNN is composed of a set of subnetworks that are
not connected to one another The selected network topology improves t
he generalization of the classifier in terms of its Vapnik-Chervonenki
s dimension (VCdim). Each subnetwork is a network of multilayer percep
tion neural network classifiers operating in parallel with the rest of
the system. Each subnetwork is assigned to learn the label of one ver
tex of a graph, The detection scheme combines the decisions of the sub
networks to classify an image graph extracted from an input image bloc
k. This visual computational model is potentially useful for partial m
atching where the object is occluded. Performance of the system is tes
ted in modeling and detection of human eye regions in face images with
some degree of variation in the direction of pose; (C) 1997 SPIE and
IS&T.