An Approach to Spatio-Temporal Queries - Interval-Based Contents Representation of Images

Contents retrieval from image sequences can be expressed with predicates on them. This paper introduces spatio-temporal predicates to be applied to image sequences. Numerous kinds of queries with spatio-temporal relations between objects, e.g., topological relations, direction relations, temporal relations, and combinations of them, are expressed with the predicates. We also show with examples how such queries are processed in a database storing interval data created by projecting objects appearing in image sequences on the x-, y-, or time-axis. A representation of spatio-temporal concepts is employed with primitive operations for illustrating the process in this paper.