Qualitative Spatial Reasoning for Visual Grouping in Sketches

Abstract

We believe that qualitative spatial reasoning provides a bridge between perception and cognition, by using visual computations to construct structural descriptions that have functional significance. We provide evidence for this hypothesis by describing how qualitative spatial reasoning can be used to model aspects of visual structure in sketches. We begin by outlining the nuSketch spatial reasoning architecture, including the representation of glyphs and sketches and the use of qualitative topology and Voronoi diagrams to construct spatial representations. We then describe our use of spatial analogies as a means for exploring the structure of visual representations. Three concepts of visual structure in sketches are introduced: connected glyph groups, contained glyph groups, and positional relations. We show that by using visual reasoning techniques to compute these qualitative descriptions, spatial analogies involving sketches are significantly improved.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA465870

Entities

People

  • Emmett Tomai
  • Jeffrey Usher
  • Ken Forbus

Organizations

  • Northwestern University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Analogies
  • Cognition
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Coordinate Systems
  • Image Processing
  • Judgment
  • Language
  • Models
  • Orientation (Direction)
  • Position Finding
  • Psychological Phenomena And Processes
  • Psychology
  • Reasoning
  • Recognition
  • Thinking
  • Triangulation

Readers

  • Computer Vision.
  • Graph Algorithms and Convex Optimization.
  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).