Tutorial CIVI-T Understanding the spatial organization of image regions

Space plays a fundamental role in human cognition. In everyday situations, it is often viewed as a construct induced by spatial relationships, rather than as a container that exists independently of the objects located in it. Spatial relationships, therefore, have been thoroughly investigated in many disciplines, including cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, geography and artificial intelligence. In computer vision and related fields, understanding the spatial organization of regions in images is an important task. The need to handle imprecision and uncertainty when processing spatial data has long been recognized, and spatial relationships often find good models in fuzzy relations, whether they are naturally loaded with ambiguity or associated with crisp mathematical definitions. The tutorial gives a summary on the subject and focuses on two fundamental questions: How to identify the spatial relationships between two given objects? How to identify the object that best satisfies a given relationship to a reference object? Applications in various domains, such as scene description, human-robot communication, object classification and retrieval, are presented.