Reasoning about cardinal directions between extended objects Original Research Article

Direction relations between extended spatial objects are important commonsense knowledge. Recently, Goyal and Egenhofer proposed a relation model, known as the cardinal direction calculus (CDC), for representing direction relations between connected plane regions. The CDC is perhaps the most expressive qualitative calculus for directional information, and has attracted increasing interest from areas such as artificial intelligence, geographical information science, and image retrieval. Given a network of CDC constraints, the consistency problem is deciding if the network is realizable by connected regions in the real plane. This paper provides a cubic algorithm for checking the consistency of complete networks of basic CDC constraints, and proves that reasoning with the CDC is in general an NP-complete problem. For a consistent complete network of basic CDC constraints, our algorithm returns a ‘canonical’ solution in cubic time. This cubic algorithm is also adapted to check the consistency of complete networks of basic cardinal constraints between possibly disconnected regions.