A spatial match retrieval mechanism for symbolic pictures

Abstract Spatial relationships are important ingredients of spatial access methods in retrieval mechanism systems for pictorial or multimedia databases. We suggest a one-to-one mapping method of retrieving the symbolic pictures in a pictorial database based upon the spatial relationships among the objects in the picture. In our mechanism, each picture or query is transformed into a set of ordered triples ( O i , O j , r ij )'s, where O i and O j are two objects and r ij is the spatial relationship between O i and O j . Then we construct a one-to-one mapping table for all ( O i , O j , r ij )'s of all the pictures in the pictorial database. By searching the preconstructed mapping table for all of the ( O i , O j , r ij )'s associated with a query, the desired pictures can be easily determined. Besides, the proposed spatial match retrieval approach can be easily embedded into various systems such as parallelism systems or distributed database system.