ALC(F): a new description logics for spatial reasoning in images
Résumé
In image interpretation and computer vision, spatial relations
between objects and spatial reasoning are of prime importance
for recognition and interpretation tasks. Quantitative representations of
spatial knowledge have been proposed in the literature. In the Artificial
Intelligence community, logical formalisms such as ontologies have
also been proposed for spatial knowledge representation and reasoning,
and a challenging and open problem consists in bridging the gap between
these ontological representations and the quantitative ones used in image
interpretation. In this paper, we propose a new description logic, named
ALC(F), dedicated to spatial reasoning for image understanding. Our
logic relies on the family of description logics equipped with concrete
domains, a widely accepted way to integrate quantitative and qualitative
qualities of real world objects in the conceptual domain, in which
we have integrated mathematical morphological operators as predicates.
Merging description logics with mathematical morphology enables us
to provide new mechanisms to derive useful concrete representations of
spatial concepts and new qualitative and quantitative spatial reasoning
tools. It also enables imprecision and uncertainty of spatial knowledge
to be taken into account through the fuzzy representation of spatial
relations. We illustrate the benefits of our formalism on a model-guided
cerebral image interpretation task.