A SPATIAL MATCH RETRIEVAL MECHANISM FOR SYMBOLIC PICTURES

Spatial relationships are important ingredients of spatial access meth ods in retrieval mechanism systems for pictorial or multimedia databas es. We suggest a one-to-one mapping method of retrieving the symbolic pictures in a pictorial database based upon the spatial relationships among the objects in the picture. In our mechanism, each picture or qu ery is transformed into a set of ordered triples (O-i, O-j, r(ij))'s, where O-i and O-j are two objects and r(ij) is the spatial relationshi p between O-i and O-j. Then we construct a one-to-one mapping table fo r all (O-i, O-j, r(ij))'s of all the pictures in the pictorial databas e. By searching the preconstructed mapping table for all of the (O-i, O-j, r(ij))'s associated with a query, the desired pictures can be eas ily determined. Besides, the proposed spatial match retrieval approach can be easily embedded into various systems such as parallelism syste ms or distributed database system. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Scie nce Inc. All rights reserved.