Scene Description Using Spatial Relationships Derived From Visual Information

This paper proposes a method for scene description of images using spatial relationships between objects in images. The words for describing images such as 'right' and 'left' are qualitative. It is hard to quantify them for computer processing because humans have subjective fuzziness against them. Accordingly, various subjective experiments were performed about spatial words and a method for quantifying spatial relationships is proposed as the result of the experiments. The SPatial-relationship based DEscription system (SPADE) is also introduced. Application of this research should prove especially valuable in areas such as image retrieval systems and image handling systems.