A novel fuzzy cardinal direction model with topological reference

Direction relationship is one of the fundamental elements of spatial reasoning, spatial semantics matching, fuzzy query of spatial relationships and object-oriented image analysis. Due to their natural uncertainty and complexity, modeling directional relations keeps being challenged. This work proposes a new fuzzy model for representing cardinal direction relations based on topological reference. The new model formalizes the topological constraints by the topological reference. And based on topological reference, direction tiles are divided and the fuzzy membership functions are defined with the new partition of direction tiles according to each tile's own feature. In this article, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this model in comparison with traditional fuzzy models. The results show that this model provides better results in fuzzy representation of direction relations than the traditional ones.