Title: Speaking with spatial relations

Authors: Lukasz Wawrzyniak, Dennis Nikitenko, Pascal Matsakis

Addresses: Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario Canada, N1G 2W1. ' Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario Canada, N1G 2W1. ' Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario Canada, N1G 2W1

Abstract: Natural language descriptions are an important step in bridging the gap between numerical representations of spatial data and the human user. In this work, we present a system for generating linguistic descriptions of the spatial relationships between two-dimensional objects. The most pertinent relations for the description are chosen based on a fuzzification of the set relations DISJOINT, OVERLAP, SUBSET, SUBSETi and EQUAL. A handful of relevant Allen relations is then selected and their Allen F-histograms are analysed to extract further topological and directional information. The approach is validated using several sets of real and synthetic data.

Keywords: spatial relationships; topological relations; Allen relations; set relations; directional relations; natural language; linguistic descriptions; F-histograms; fuzzy set theory; scene understanding; computer vision; geographical information systems; GIS; uncertainty.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2006.009909

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2006 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.280 - 300

Published online: 01 Jun 2006 *

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