The computational aspect of retrieval by spatial arrangement
Image retrieval by spatial arrangement underlies a matching problem for the interpretation of entities specified in the user query on the entities appearing in the image of the database, and for the joint comparison of their features and spatial relationships. In this paper, we provide a graph-theoretical formulation of the problem and discuss its implication on indexing and matching. We first identify an indexing scheme which may fit the characteristics of the problem, and then expound and evaluate an efficient graph matching technique which makes this indexing approach viable.