In mathematics, upper hemicontinuity and lower hemicontinuity are extensions of the notions of upper and lower semicontinuity of single-valued functions to set-valued functions. A set-valued function that is both upper and lower hemicontinuous is said to be continuous in an analogy to the property of the same name for single-valued functions.
To explain both notions, consider a sequence a of points in a domain, and a sequence b of points in the range. We say that b corresponds to a if each point in b is contained in the image of the corresponding point in a.