Archival and retrieval of symbolic images: An invariant scheme based on triangular spatial relationship

In this paper, a novel scheme for representing symbolic images in a symbolic image database (SID) is proposed. The proposed scheme is based on triangular spatial relationship (TSR) [Pattern Recognition Lett. 22 (2001) 999]. The scheme preserves TSR among the components in a symbolic image by the use of quadruples. A SID is created through the construction of B-tree, an efficient multilevel indexing structure. A methodology to retrieve similar images for a given query image is also presented. The presented retrieval model has logarithmic search time complexity. The study made in this work reveals that the model bears various advantages when compared to other existing models and could be extended towards dynamic databases. 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.