SPATIAL REASONING AND SIMILARITY RETRIEVAL OF IMAGES USING 2D C-STRING KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION

The data structure called 2D string to represent symbolic pictures was proposed by Chang et al. It allows a natural way to construct iconic indexes for pictures. A new spatial knowledge representation of a 2D C-string with accompanying cutting mechanism and a set of spatial operators are proposed. 2D C-string is more characteristic of spatial knowledge in images and is more efficient in representation and manipulation of images. Since a spatial relationship is a fuzzy concept, the capability of similarity retrieval is essential in image database systems. The spatial query and spatial reasoning based on a 2D C-string representation are presented. The similarity measure is defined and the algorithm for similarity retrieval of iconic images is also proposed.