Inference mechanisms about spatial relations constitute an important aspect of spatial reasoning as they allow users to derive unknown spatial information from a set of known spatial relations. When formalized in the form of algebras, spatial-relation inferences represent a mathematically sound definition of the behavior of spatial relations, which can be used to specify constraints in spatial ...

This paper describes an architecture for dynamically handling spatial relations in an incremental, nonmonotonic diagrammatic reasoning system. The architecture represents jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint (JEPD) spatial relation sets as nodes in a dependency network. These spatial relation sets include interval relations, relative orientation relations, and connectivity relations, but in...

In this paper, we present a method for symbol recognition based on the spatio-structural description of a ‘vocabulary’ of extracted visual elementary parts. It is applied to symbols in electrical wiring diagrams. The method consists of first identifying vocabulary elements into different groups based on their types (e.g., circle, corner ). We then compute spatial relations between the possible ...

In this work we show how a mobile robot can use spatial information of objects to improve communication with humans and other devices located in an intelligent environment. In particular, this work focuses on using spatial relations to facilitate the creation of a connection between symbolic and perceptual representation that refer to the same physical object (anchoring). We extend an anchoring...

There are some indications that haptic space like visual space is not Euclidean (e.g. Blumenfeld, 1937 Acta Psychologica 2 125-174). In a series of experiments, we investigated the haptic perception of spatial relations in a systematic way. We restricted ourselves to a horizontal plane at waist height. Blindfolded subjects were asked to perform three tasks with their right hand: (i) a reference...

An e ective functional architecture facilitates interactions among subsystems that are often used together. Computer simulations showed that di erences in receptive eld sizes can promote such organization. When input was ltered through relatively small nonoverlapping receptive elds, arti cial neural networks learned to categorize shapes relatively quickly; in contrast, when input was ltered thr...

We present an unsupervised connectionist model for grounding color, shape and spatial relations of two objects in 2D space. The model constitutes a two-layer architecture that integrates information from visual and auditory inputs. The images are presented as the visual inputs to an artificial retina and fiveword sentences describing them (e.g. “Red box above green circle”) serve as auditory in...

Various models for the representation of topological relations have been developed. The aim of this chapter is to propose a comprehensive view of state-of-the-art models for topological relations in spatial databases. A prominent role is assumed by the CBM (calculus-based method), which offers a small set of topological relations with high expressiveness and suitability to be embedded as operat...

While qualitative relations (e.g. RCC8 relations) can readily be derived from spatial databases, a more difficult matter is the representation of vague spatial relations such as ‘near-to’,‘next-to’, ‘between’, etc. After surveying earlier approaches, this paper proposes a method that is tractable, learnable and directly suitable for use in natural language interfaces to spatial databases. The a...