Modeling Multi-object Spatial Relationships for Satellite Image Database Indexing and Retrieval

Geospatial information analysts are interested in spatial configurations of objects in satellite imagery and, more importantly, the ability to search a large-scale database of satellite images using spatial configurations as the query mechanism. In this paper we present a new method to model spatial relationships among sets of three or more objects in satellite images for scene indexing and retrieval by generating discrete spatial signatures. The proposed method is highly insensitive to scaling, rotation, and translation of the spatial configuration. Additionally, the method is efficient for use in real-time applications, such as online satellite image retrievals. Moreover, the number of objects in a spatial configuration has minimal effect on the efficiency of the method.