A fuzzy rule-based approach to scene description involving spatial relationships

Automated scene description is a very important part of, but also a very hard task in, high-level computer vision. Today, scene description is being applied in real problems such as robotic navigation. In this paper, we present a fuzzy rule-based approach that accomplishes the task of automated linguistic scene description. Membership functions for spatial relations between different components in the scene are evaluated, guided by a spatial relationship matrix that describes typical scene entities for which these relative locations are desirable. A fuzzy logic rule-based system is developed to combine the spatial relationships and other important scene properties to generate the final linguistic interpretation. Excellent results from several image examples of different types show the applicability of this approach. (C) 2000 Academic Press.