Object detection and localization using a knowledge graph on spatial relationships

A knowledge on spatial relationships between objects present in a given collection of images can provide interesting information to improve classical CBIR tasks such as object detection and localization, by reducing the searching areas of the object relatively to one or several given objects. In this paper, we propose a representation of the knowledge on relationships existing between symbolic objects in a collection of images. None exhaustively, these relationships can be co-occurrences of objects or different kinds of spatial relationships between them in images. We present a graph-based representation of this knowledge and its associated operations and properties. This work was evaluated on the public symbolic image database LabelMe. The experiments show its relevance for object detection and localization.