A spatial match retrieval mechanism for symbolic pictures

Spatial relationships are important ingredients of spatial access methods in retrieval mechanism systems for pictorial or multimedia databases. 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 query 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 relationship between O-i and O-j. Then we construct a one-to-one mapping table for all (O-i, O-j, r(ij))'s of all the pictures in the pictorial database. 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 easily determined. Besides, the proposed spatial match retrieval approach can be easily embedded into various systems such as parallelism systems or distributed database system. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.