Using 3D Spatial Relationships for Image Retrieval by XML Annotation

Abstract

Retrieval of images from image databases using spatial relationship can be effectively performed through visual interface systems. In these systems, the representation of images with 2D strings, which is derived from symbolic projections, provides an efficient and natural way to construct image index and is also an ideal representation for the visual query. With this approach, retrieval issue is reduced to matching two symbolic strings. However, 2D-string representations might not specify spatial relationships between the objects in an image. Ambiguities arise for the retrieval of images of 3D scenes. In order to remove ambiguity in the description of objects’ spatial relationships, in this paper, images are referred by considering spatial relationships using the spatial location algebra for the 3D image scene.