An Ontology for Qualitative Description of Images

Our approach describes any image qualitatively by detecting regions/objects in the image and describing its visual characteristics (shape and colour) and its spatial characteristics (orientation and topology) by means of qualitative models. The description obtained is translated into a Description Logic (DL) based ontology which provides a formal and explicit meaning to the qualitative tags which represents the visual features of the objects in the image and the spatial relations between them. As a result, for any image, our approach obtains a set of individuals which are classified, using a DL reasoner, according to the descriptions of our ontology.