Computing the inverse of cardinal direction relations between regions

Abstract

The inversion of directions is an important operation with directions which plays an important role in qualitative spatial reasoning and spatial queries. In this work, we address on the inversion operation of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal. The direction relation matrix model proposed by Goyal is a projection-based model for spatial direction relations between regions. This model is simple in calculation and easy to carry out formal reasoning, which is considered as currently one of the most excellent models for representation and qualitative reasoning with cardinal direction relations in two-dimensional space. This work aims to realize the automatic inference and calculation of the inverse of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal and further to improve the ability of spatial reasoning and spatial analysis of spatial database. In order to avoid the complicated manual reasoning, an algorithm for automatically performing the inverse operation on this model is devised by means of the operations of direction relation matrix. Theorems are provided to prove formally that our algorithm is correct and complete, which is also verified by comparing the result of our algorithm with that of manual reasoning for each basic cardinal direction relation. This study realized the automatic inference and calculation of the inverse of the basic cardinal direction relations in the model of Goyal and further improved the ability of spatial reasoning and spatial analysis of spatial database.

Reasoning with the Inverse of 3D Cardinal Direction Relations Based on Direction Matrices

“…Direction relation is an important part of spatial relations, which reflects the order relations between spatial objects, such as front side, back side, left side, right side, etc. It is widely used in many fields such as Spatial Intelligent Analysis and Processing, Urban Pipeline Network, Robot Navigation, Disaster Prevention and Mitigation, etc [1,2].And it is increasingly becoming a hot and difficult problem in the fields of Data Modeling, Cartographic Synthesis, Multimedia Design, Image Retrieval, etc [3]. The expression and reasoning with direction relation is a foundmental problem in the research field of spatial direction relations [4], which is important in Spatial Retrieval [5,6], Spatial Localization [7,8], Quality Inspection [9,10] and Spatial Storage [11] in the field of spatial database.…”