Multiscale Histograms: Summarizing Topological Relations in Large Spatial Datasets

Summarizing topological relations is fundamental to many spatial applications including spatial query optimization. In this paper, we present several novel techniques to effectively construct cell density based spatial histograms for range (window) summarizations restricted to the four most important topological relations: contains, contained, overlap, and disjoint. We first present a novel framework to construct a multiscale histogram composed of multiple Euler histograms with the guarantee of the exact summarization results for aligned windows in constant time. Then we present an approximate algorithm, with the approximate ratio 19/12, to minimize the storage spaces of such multiscale Euler histograms, although the problem is generally NP-hard. To conform to a limited storage space where only k Euler histograms are allowed, an effective algorithm is presented to construct multiscale histograms to achieve high accuracy. Finally, we present a new approximate algorithm to query an Euler histogram that cannot guarantee the exact answers; it runs in constant time. Our extensive experiments against both synthetic and real world datasets demonstrated that the approximate multiscale histogram techniques may improve the accuracy of the existing techniques by several orders of magnitude while retaining the cost efficiency, and the exact multiscale histogram technique requires only a storage space linearly proportional to the number of cells for the real datasets.