Abstract
In order to analyze images and recognize complex objects, it is necessary to not only recognize the different parts of the objects but also consider spatial relations between parts of the objects. For the recognition of objects with a complex structure, a suitable representation of the spatial relations between the different parts taking account their shape features is required, as it is necessary to capture the coherence of the various positional relations between the different parts of the objects. Therefore, it is impossible to assume that the sub-region of a complex object is a point, and it must be treated as a lump region. There are many problems related to the representation of spatial relations between lump regions. In previous studies, the relations are represented using typical features of the regions such as center of the gravity, leftmost or rightmost points, or characteristic points for polygon approximation. However it is impossible to determine positional relations considering the lumps. In this paper, we propose a method for the representation of spatial relations between two lump regions based on the histogram that can be defined when we consider the angle θ between the line connecting two points (one in each lump region) and the horizontal line, and on the fuzzy sets, defined on θ , expressing the spatial relations between two objects. The method is applied to the representation of the spatial relations between free shape regions and its efficiency is discussed.
