Qualitative Reasoning for Spatial Matching

Matching two representations against one another is central to many applications, e.g., matching observation against models in object or scene recognition or matching a local perception against a global map in self-localization if a mobile robot. In both examples, spatial information structures are associated, i.e., the representation includes spatial arrangement information of individual parts, either in a relative or an absolute frame of reference. In this paper the utility of qualitative configuration information for matching is investigated. Qualitative configuration information expresses relative arrangement information. It is argued that such information is helpful for making side conditions of plausible matchings explicit, which can improve matching efficiency as well as quality of the matching.