Ulf Grenander in the context of Image processing

Pattern theory, formulated by Ulf Grenander, is a mathematical formalism to describe knowledge of the world as patterns. It differs from other approaches to artificial intelligence in that it does not begin by prescribing algorithms and machinery to recognize and classify patterns; rather, it prescribes a vocabulary to articulate and recast the pattern concepts in precise language. Broad in its mathematical coverage, Pattern Theory spans algebra and statistics, as well as local topological and global entropic properties.

In addition to the new algebraic vocabulary, its statistical approach is novel in its aim to:

In statistics, sieve estimators are a class of non-parametric estimators which use progressively more complex models to estimate an unknown high-dimensional function as more data becomes available, with the aim of asymptotically reducing error towards zero as the amount of data increases. This method is generally attributed to Ulf Grenander.